Lyten, a Silicon Valley-based company, is revolutionizing the energy storage market with its groundbreaking lithium-sulfur battery technology. These batteries offer significantly higher energy density and are significantly lighter than traditional lithium-ion batteries while eliminating the need for environmentally harmful mined minerals.
Laszlo Horvath is responsible for international business development at Lyten. Based out of the Washington DC area, he has been an active angel investor and mentor in multiple Silicon Valley based angel investment networks. He serves as a judge in startup pitch competitions, including UC Berkeley’s Pitch Globally – San Francisco, the Global Forum’s Innovation Competition- Paris and CES -Las Vegas.
He was a speaker at the Energy Summit in Davos last week. In an exclusive interview with TRENDS on the sidelines of Davos 2025, Horvath talked about this technology and other developments in the energy sector.
What are the key takeaways from Davos vis-a-vis energy?
The most substantive takeaway at Davos was that we need a lot of energy. Otherwise, AI is not going to continue to grow. And all those sources of power that need to be cultivated must have the least impact on the environment. That includes a wide variety of sources. Another interesting takeaway was that it’s becoming common knowledge even in Davos that solar is useless because you can’t store it without battery storage. But battery storage is not necessarily the best thing that can happen to the environment. So the discussion is getting more into the factual details of what is really happening in the energy sector.
Which parts and markets in that spectrum are you most excited about?
Right now, my most exciting focus is stationary batteries because there’s a term that I learned today, and it came from one of the Danish panelists. It is called ‘energy poverty’. When you do not have a reliable electricity grid, you live in energy poverty, and that’s detrimental to your quality of life. So if you want to help people in countries that do not have a reliable power grid, sustainable energy holds the key, because you don’t need big investments. You can have it as a microgrid or a mini-grid, have the solar panels capture the electricity, and store it in environmentally friendly storage solutions like ours.
Can you tell us about the lithium-sulfur batteries that Lyten does and how are they revolutionizing the market space?
It’s about half the weight of a lithium-ion battery but it has twice the energy density. And that’s just the beginning of this technology. It has a laundry list of positive benefits. For the context of this discussion, the only battery chemistry that thrives in high temperatures is our battery chemistry.
Above 35 degrees Celsius, we experience a 20 percent increase in performance. And that’s exactly where lithium-ion batteries lose performance. So if you want to avoid that, you have to spend a significant percentage of your battery power on cooling your batteries. In our case, we don’t need cooling because we perform better in heat. And there’s another element to this. When you are buying a battery storage solution for a village or a block of buildings or three blocks of buildings, you want that to be a long-term investment. Lithium-ion batteries, the current legacy technologies, they die. So they underperform in the short run, and they go out of energy in the medium. That’s the biggest advantage for tropical countries, the global south, or you can call it the tropical band of emerging markets, which will account for nearly 80 percent of growth in the next 30 years. We are going to have an 80 percent increase, almost doubling the energy consumption because of AI. About 80 percent of that should come from sustainable energy sources. Otherwise, the planet is going to go haywire.
Which markets offer the biggest opportunities for you and why?
At this stage of our development, we are acquiring factories and converting the legacy lithium-ion factories into lithium-sulfur ones. So, at this moment, we need capital and we need partners who are not only financial partners but also understand the nature of our business, and the cost structure of our batteries, which is a second big advantage because, apart from producing less heat, our batteries do not have any mined materials. We do not have nickel, manganese, cobalt, or graphite.
So in an environment like Davos, where people tend to care about the environment, we check all the boxes because we do not represent any kind of risk to nature. So we are ecologically as friendly as it is humanly possible. The material that we use, feedstock sulfur, is a byproduct of oil and gas refining, abundantly available anywhere in the world. Lithium is a material that is also available anywhere in the world, and we get it from brine using direct lithium extraction. It’s our patented technology. We work with partners in this direction. So, these are the two main feedstocks. And the secret sauce that holds them together is the three-dimensional graphene that we get from natural gas.
Graphene is a hyper-strong, conductive material that replaces the old lithium-ion ingredients in batteries. So we need places, we need partners, we need relationships, and we need capital.
Who are your current partners and investors?
Our investors, who have raised about $500 million, include institutional investors, and corporate investors like Stellantis, FedEx, the European Innovation Fund, and Luxembourg. I am sure I skipped a few. And, we have been awarded a $650 million financing instrument to scale our product as well. As a result, we have acquired one factory for conversion in California.
What is your call to action for the attendees in Davos this year?
Depending on your role, for media, let’s get the word out. You can electrify everything, you can decarbonize everything, and you can make money in the process, but not with current technologies. If you hear someone saying, ‘Oh, we have all these lofty goals’, they’re not going to reach them with current technologies. You need technologies that leapfrog the current technologies. So, for a media expert like you, the goal is to educate the market.
There are technologies out there that can help you electrify everything, decarbonize, and make money because of the opportunity to create energy storage out of very abundantly available cheap materials. For investors, the biggest opportunity I’ve seen in the energy industry is to convert lithium-ion factories into lithium-sulfur. There are dozens and dozens of lithium-ion factories stranded. We can easily acquire them and convert them if we have enough capital. But it requires leadership, it requires vision, it requires people who understand the details of the battery industry, not just the surface level. Not all batteries are created equal. That’s for the investors to take care of that investment opportunity and make sure that the billions of dollars invested in lithium-ion batteries are not wasted. It is also important for corporate partners to take notice of these developments. They understand the customers. We need to work together to incorporate their goals and their specific requirements into our product line so that we can put the batteries into the right battery pack, managed by the right battery management system.
And what are your sustainability goals?
We are pretty much completely decarbonized. Our 3D graphene comes with a 2.5x decarbonization factor.
Any partnerships to announce here?
We have placed a large order from an African country. It’s an MOU. We understand that they are interested in acquiring our storage solutions. There are about 460 companies that expressed interest. After the panel I got a stack of business cards, and they include locomotive builders of trains, companies that build sustainable living solutions, and industrial conglomerates from Europe, Asia, and the United States as well. Plus the whole supply chain. This is essentially a different supply chain for batteries because we don’t need the expensive parts. That’s why we are lightweight. We have no heavy metals, nothing that’s mined. So this is a huge opportunity for a lot of companies. And apart from a cleaner planet, one of the pillars is the human-centric approach.
Are you more optimistic today compared to before the start of the forum?
Hundred percent. And not just in the long run, the generational switch, but also generations today that are active and running the show. They are becoming more and more ROI-focused, more and more driven by market forces than by ideology. More and more understanding that your product has to perform better if you want to bring it to the people. Because the better the performance, the better the quality. If that helps you reach your other goals, who would go against those products? Everyone would switch without too much marketing. Word-of-mouth would get around.
Are there any particular Middle East partnerships being discussed?
We are very excited about the GCC region in general and the UAE in particular. The UAE has a tradition of leading and not following, experimenting, trying to have plenty of sunshine, plenty of energy, plenty of sulfur, plenty of lithium out of the brine. So for me, that’s a natural next step.
The GCC region is ideal for us. Also, traditionally, those countries have very close ties to huge markets that can be reached by duty-free, tariff-free agreements, or just simply investments in local companies. Because we are not the solution to everything everywhere. Our partners can be the solution providers to many things in many countries together. And, the UAE is one of the examples of how to create those partnerships worldwide.