China controls more than 98% of global LFP cathode active-material production. For manufacturers outside that ecosystem, the options are limited to either importing finished cathode material or reproducing a supply chain.
Importing material is further complicated by China in 2025, after it imposed licensing requirements on advanced LFP cathodes. And if you want to reproduce the supply chain, that includes its own distinct upstream step. That step is the conversion of raw materials into Precursor Cathode Active Material (PCAM) to meet tightly specified physical and chemical standards.
Purchasing cathode-production equipment does not solve this: a manufacturer may still depend on its equipment supplier for PCAM feedstock, which accounts for a large share of material cost. The US Department of Energy projects the global advanced-battery industry to grow more than fivefold by 2035, making the case for a viable alternative outside China’s supply chain more urgent with each year.
Nascent Materials is developing a different route. Its proprietary melt-fusion process converts a wider range of raw materials directly into LFP and LMFP cathode powders, removing the need for a separate PCAM production step.
To better understand how they are doing it, we spoke to Chaitanya Sharma, CEO & Co-founder of Nascent Materials. This article contains notable highlights from our entire conversation.
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“Instead of rebuilding China’s entire cathode supply chain, we designed a process that bypasses PCAM and converts locally available raw materials directly into battery-grade cathodes.”
— Robin Brundle
Chaitanya Sharma is the Founder and CEO of Nascent Materials. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from IIT Roorkee and a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.
His career spans lithium-ion cell manufacturing, gigafactory development, and supply chain design. He was the first engineer hired for Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory project, joining before construction began.
He also held a senior role at Lithium Americas Corporation before joining iM3NY (Imperium3 New York) as CEO in 2021. There, he led the build-out of the company’s Endicott, New York gigafactory and raised over $160 million.
Nascent Materials produces LFP cathodes without the conventional PCAM step
Nascent Materials is a battery-materials company developing cathode powders for lithium-ion batteries. It currently focuses on lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP), which are valued for their cost, safety, and long operating life.
The company’s proprietary process uses thermal melt fusion rather than the conventional route of refining raw materials into a PCAM feedstock. Melting the inputs allows Nascent to work with raw materials that have different shapes, sizes, and purity levels. The process also performs part of the purification itself, opening the possibility of using feedstocks from domestic suppliers and battery recyclers.
The process consumes approximately 20–30% less energy than conventional cathode production. By combining purification and cathode synthesis in one process, Nascent aims to reduce production costs while making regional battery supply chains easier to establish.
Nascent says its process produces cathode particles with greater physical consistency. This can improve packing density, factory yields, cell consistency, and compatibility with emerging dry-electrode manufacturing methods.
What does Nascent Materials do, and where does it fit within the battery supply chain?
Chaitanya: Nascent Materials is fundamentally a powder-processing company. We developed a proprietary production platform and applied it to cathode materials, particularly LFP and LMFP. These are the materials on the positive side of a lithium-ion battery that largely determine its cost, performance, safety, and energy-storage characteristics.
Our objective is not to introduce an entirely new battery chemistry that requires manufacturers to rebuild their factories and supply chains. We are improving the way established cathode chemistries are produced. That makes it easier for cell manufacturers to evaluate and adopt our material while continuing to use much of their existing infrastructure.
Conventional cathode production is already highly optimized. What breakthrough allows you to remove the PCAM stage?
Chaitanya: A cathode is ultimately created by making lithium, iron, phosphorus, and other required elements react in the correct structure. The conventional process first converts raw materials into PCAM with very specific physical and chemical characteristics. That conversion requires additional refining technology, equipment, energy, time, and capital.
Our process uses thermal energy to melt the inputs. Once the materials become a liquid, their original particle shape and size are no longer as important. The process can separate the components we need from unwanted impurities, which means it performs part of the refining internally. We can therefore move from a broader range of raw materials to battery-grade cathode material without first creating a separate PCAM product.
Why did the industry standardize around the conventional process instead of melt fusion?
Chaitanya: Cathode production developed around the feedstocks, infrastructure, and industrial byproducts available to Chinese manufacturers. The conventional solid-state process was a sensible fit for that ecosystem, and China subsequently scaled it extremely well. Once a process reaches that level of maturity, most new manufacturers naturally try to reproduce it.
There is also a commercial reason the model persisted. A company can purchase cathode-production equipment and technical knowledge, but it may remain dependent on the original supplier for the PCAM feedstock, which represents a large share of the material cost. We approached the problem from the perspective of a cathode customer and asked what process would work with the resources available outside that established ecosystem.
How does greater particle consistency improve battery manufacturing?
Chaitanya: A gigafactory must produce millions of cells with very similar performance. A cathode powder can meet its chemical-purity target and still vary in particle size, shape, or other physical properties. Those variations can affect coating, electrode formation, factory yields, cell capacity, and consistency from one cell to another.
Our process is designed to create a narrower and more consistent particle distribution. The particles fit together more efficiently, almost like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. That can produce a denser electrode, help manufacturers achieve more predictable results, and reduce the amount of material and processing lost to inconsistent production.
China has already scaled cathode manufacturing extensively. How can Nascent’s process reach comparable volumes?
Chaitanya: Scalability is central to our process design. One gigawatt-hour of LFP cells can require roughly 2,200–2,500 tonnes of cathode material, so a process that only works in a laboratory has limited commercial value.
We reduce scale-up risk by combining industrial operations that have already been used at large volumes. Melting and thermal processing have existed in the metals, ceramics, and foundry industries for generations. Our proprietary work lies in selecting the feedstocks, controlling the reactions, and connecting those established operations so that they produce battery-grade cathode material.
Using a partner’s existing infrastructure, we recently demonstrated an approximately 500-fold scale-up. We are now progressing from bench scale toward a pilot target of around 1,000 kilograms per day, or hundreds of tonnes annually.
What is “Gen 4” LFP, and how does your material compare with it?
Chaitanya: The term generally refers to a denser form of LFP. A battery cell has a fixed internal volume, so packing more active material into that volume can increase the amount of energy it stores. This matters because conventional LFP offers excellent safety, cost, and cycle life but usually has lower energy density than nickel- and cobalt-based cathodes.
The consistency of our particles naturally enables tighter packing and greater density. We were pursuing that characteristic before “Gen 4” became a common market term, but the underlying objective is similar. A denser LFP material could help reduce the energy-density gap while retaining LFP’s other advantages.
That can expand the chemistry into applications such as drones, defence systems, longer-range vehicles, and other products that require greater energy storage without accepting the fire risk or cost associated with some alternative chemistries.
How does your process affect energy consumption and the environmental footprint of cathode production?
Chaitanya: Conventional cathode production may consume around 3.5–4 kilowatt-hours of energy per kilogram of material. Our current estimates place our process at approximately 3–3.2 kilowatt-hours per kilogram, with some trials indicating that it could fall below three. That represents roughly a 20–30% reduction at the cathode-production stage.
The comparison becomes more significant when the eliminated PCAM stage is included. Conventional energy figures for cathode production often exclude the energy consumed while refining and converting raw inputs into PCAM. We combine purification and synthesis, so the total reduction across the complete production chain could be considerably larger.
Our material may also help cell manufacturers use less energy. More uniform powders can improve production yields and are better suited to dry-electrode processes, which avoid the conventional slurry-coating and drying stage. That stage is one of the largest energy consumers in cell manufacturing.
Could this process make battery recycling more practical?
Chaitanya: Many recyclers can recover useful lithium, iron, phosphorus, and other materials from used batteries, but they struggle to refine those outputs into the exact PCAM specification required by conventional cathode plants. As a result, recovered material may be diverted into lower-value applications instead of returning to battery production.
Because our process can accept a wider range of inputs and perform purification during synthesis, it could connect recycling outputs directly with cathode manufacturing. That would help close the material loop, reduce demand for newly extracted resources, and make regional circular-battery supply chains more practical.
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