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At the 2026 Consumer Electronic Show, a tiny Finnish startup named Donut Lab grabbed major headlines by announcing they are now producing and selling an all solidstate battery with a very long list of seemingly impossible characteristics. Frankly, we were surprised to see so many large publications willingly repeat the claims with so few substantiating details. I earned my university degree in broadcast journalism, and one basic lesson I gleaned was that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. So, let's first go over the claims.
This battery is said to have a 100,000 cycle life, 400 W hours per kilogram energy density, $130 per kilowatt hour cost, which is parody with nickel, maganese, cobalt, lithium ion cells at small scale, no toxic materials, no rare earth materials, which includes no lithium or cobalt, no fire risk, less than 5% energy loss at -30° C, and 100° C, a charging C rate of at least 10C, which translates to 5minute charging capabilities, minimal thermal expansion or no swelling, no liquid cooling required at 5C charging rates, can be conformed to nearly any shape, stating it is claylike, and variable cell voltage engineering flexibility. Sounds like a dream come true.
Like many of you, our initial reaction to these solid state battery claims was heavy skepticism bordering on doubt. But the more we dug in, the more interesting it got. We've spent several days doing investigative work for this episode of the Power Chronicles. In order to determine if Doughnut Lab's solid state surprise is a brazen bamboozle, a well-curated branding of viable technology which was publicly disclosed years ago, or something else entirely.
Let's start with a disclaimer. We'll provide our sources for all of the facts to follow, but we'll also engage in some speculation, which we'll identify in the moment. Even though producer Tim and I have worked with many automakers launching EVs for 15 years, and we've been covering electric transportation technology for nearly 5 years on this network, neither of us have doctorates in chemistry, physics, or manufacturing. We are a pair of reasonably resourceful critical thinkers in the information age using all of the modern tools available to put the puzzle pieces together to the best of our ability. There are chapters in this video so you can skip straight to the subtopic of your interest if you don't want the full context. Here are the questions we've set out to answer. Who are the experts behind the design? Who writes the checks? And who is doing the manufacturing? Where is the research, material sourcing, and manufacturing taking place? What are these battery claims? And how might the battery achieve each one of these claims simultaneously? What are the implications?
First, who is behind the solid state battery claims? And what is our connection to Donut Lab? Well, back in 2023, we interviewed CEO and founder of Verge Motorcycles, Tuomo Letoaki, at their consumer electronic show debut. He went into great detail about his company's high-performance electric motorcycle and their unique in-house donut hubless rim motor. You can find a link to that interview in this video's description. Tuo's brother, Marco, is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Verge, overseeing motor development, software, and supporting architecture. In 2025, Marco returned to CES as the CEO of Donut Lab, a spin-off commercializing next generation Verge Donut Hub motors and other technology as a supplier to other manufacturers. Marco has also adapted core technologies for military purposes with another spin-off called ESOC. Prior to Verge, the Letoaki family's wealth came from their multi-million dollar international parts business that put the brothers at the center of a vast network of component manufacturing companies, which could produce the parts needed to build a motorcycle. Swanwell has a degree in mechatronics and Marco in computer science. Our searches of their company's workforce don't reveal a publicly listed heavyweight battery team. So, how is Donut Labs able to develop and manufacture a battery which is better than the best global players with fewer than 100 employees?
One explanation could be that they acquired a largely developed technology in 2025. Back in March of 2025, Donut Labs publicly disclosed their investment in Helsinki energy tech startup Nordic Nano. Their ownership stake put Marco on the board and established a strategic partnership. Nordic Nano became a company in 2024 with a focus on nanom mass technology for both photovoltaic and battery applications. When the company was seeking financing early on, they revealed a battery production process based on nano printing technology developed at the University of Eastern Finland. The company received millions of dollars in public funding and one stated function using this money was to commercialize the intellectual property from academic faculty to market. In 2024, Nordic Nano said their screen printed batteries they were manufacturing utilized their nanotech innovations as well as a second carbon nano mass developed by an unnamed German research source. As recently as May 2025, Nordic Nano's website menu had a product section which touted their NN storage battery product with 50,000 plus cycle life, 400 W hours per kilogram, nonflammability, non-toxic commonplace materials, and rapid charge times, just as doughnut labs had done recently. As recently as July of 2025, Nordic Nano published a job listing for a senior chemist to work at their Imatra factory, which we will talk more about later, on a solid state salt energy storage program. They were seeking a team member specifically with carbon nano tube experience inside diverse reactive structures. Those are important battery chemistry clues. Around that time, Nordic Nano erased the product section of their website. They removed all marketing of their previously trademarked NN energy storage solutions. Once discovered, a discovery cannot be undiscovered. So where did the intellectual property go? We speculate that ownership or access to energy storage IP transferred to their strategic partner Donut Lab sometime during the last half of 2025. Nordic Nano's LinkedIn post about the Donut Lab investment was phrased as growth for Nordic Nano. That could indicate that they gained an ownership stake in Donut Lab rather than only accepting capital. It's also possible that the companies exchange stock for mutual ownership, enabling all kinds of resources and IP to flow freely between the organizations, perhaps at the behest of overarching ownership. More on that soon.
In January of 2026, when Donut Lab announced their solid state battery, Nordic Nano reposted the press release. This LinkedIn commenter credited Nordic Nano with developing the battery for Donut Lab, and the company responded with gratitude rather than refuting the premise. Nordic Nano also posted with photos of their leadership standing in front of solid state battery marketing materials at the Doughut Lab booth. The post called for more partners to schedule meetings in order to discuss business within that context. This could be an indicator that perhaps Donuts permission to produce batteries using Nordic Nano technology is non-exclusive. Nordic Nano chief scientist Bella Biscuit also reposted the Donut Lab solid state battery press release to her LinkedIn. So far, all signs seem to point to her groundbreaking decades long titanium dioxide nanoructure and atomic deposition layer expertise enabling the solid state breakthrough. There is a sticking point. Marco at Donut Labs told publication The Verge that the battery they are marketing and implementing does not come from Nordic Nano. With so many identical specifications and these close ties in an identical timeline, a transfer of intellectual property and a minor misuse of insinuation could allow these claims to be true in the context of our speculation.
How could Doughnut Lab afford to buy a technology so far along that it could be in production merely months after Nordic Nano stopped promoting it? This question led us to search for bigger money. It didn't take long to find a billionaire behind all of it. This is Pataryi Latella, the Finnish co-founder of wearable fitness company Aura Health, which makes the Aura Ring. He has invested in countless companies directly and through many venture capital partnerships. Back in 2023, he invested directly into Verge motorcycles. A couple months later, Donut Lab was spun out of Verge with his investment carrying to the lab as well. That transformation instantly multiplied the total addressable market, creating significant new value from Verge's software, motor architecture, and other intellectual property. In February of 2025, Peter directly invested in Nordic Nano. Donut Labs did too. Many of Perry's companies could benefit from highly printable solid-state batteries, including Aura wearables, Verge, and Doughnut Lab products. Donut Lab is well suited to handle the marketing, sales, and integration engineering required to get their customizable battery cell technology integrated with products in all sectors. Nordic Nano's team of scientists and business people is not a great fit for that kind of work. A transfer of the energy storage division to Donut Lab appears to be an obvious solution, even if cells might be produced with help from their strategic partner, Nordic Nano.
How is a battery like that even possible? So far, I've gone into the weeds about the structure and timeline, but many viewers are probably skeptical that such a battery could even exist at all. In order to explore, we need a little bit of common understanding of how energy storage can work. A battery is a chemical energy storage tank. When a battery discharges, a chemical reaction happens inside that releases tiny particles called electrons. These electrons flow out of one terminal through the cable and your device to make it work, eventually passing through to the other terminal, returning to the battery. When the battery is being charged, incoming current forces those electrons to travel back through the wire to their original starting point through the opposite terminal. This process resets the chemicals, storing the energy inside a material for later use. Because it relies on changing chemicals, this process is steady and takes a bit of time. Each cycle degrades the battery material slightly, reducing total capacity. Faster charging and discharging increases friction as particles pass one another, raising temperature and increasing that degradation. If the current is too high in either direction, cell damage can occur.
A capacitor works more like a static electricity shock you've probably felt from a carpet. Instead of storing energy within chemicals, it stores it directly as an electric field on the surface of a material, while a battery provides a slow, steady stream of power over hours. A capacitor can charge and discharge almost instantly, dumping all its energy in a fraction of a second. This makes capacitors perfect for things like a camera flash where you need a quick burst of power rather than the long lasting endurance of a battery. There is very little degradation per cycle and they hold up to wide temperature ranges better. Capacitors store the energy on the surface of a plate which means they take up at least 20 times more space for the same amount of energy compared to a battery. The description of the doughnut lab battery exhibits the best characteristics of a battery and a capacitor, but they are publicly calling it a battery rather than using a generic term such as energy storage device or a specific term such as super capacitor. That terminology choice indicates that there is a spongelike substance where the chemical energy is stored through a process called intercolation. That part of a battery is called the cathode.
Let's explore one way a battery meeting all of the specifications Donnut Lab is advertising could be constructed. This is where the Nordic Nano job posting we mentioned earlier becomes relevant. They were looking for carbon nano tube in reactive substance expertise for their salt battery manufacturing line. In order to hit the 400 W hours per kilogram energy density about twice that of today's EV batteries, one cathode material option is to use lightweight salts in the form of a sodiated organic carbonylbased material cathode. Sodium is prone to swelling, but a carbon nanomass structure can work like rebar in concrete to mitigate that. It also enables much faster movement of particles through the substance during charging and discharging while reducing friction and the damage caused by rapid temperature swings. In a conventional lithium ion battery, half the space is taken up by a bulk of material just waiting to hold ions when charged. That material is called the anode. It's like having a giant empty warehouse just sitting there. We could eliminate the anode entirely, but then while the battery is being charged, sodium ions rush over to plate on the aluminum foil collector substrate as pure metallic sodium where it grows jagged spikes called dendrites, which can short out the battery, in turn, ruining it or worse. In order to prevent that situation, this battery could direct the ions to inhabit a tiny 3D forest of coaxial nano tube host structures. Think of it like a high-tech multi-level parking garage for atoms. At the very center of each tree in the forest, we have a carbon nano tube, much much thinner than a human hair. This is our superighway for electrons, which gets the power to the terminal quickly. Part of the recipe for high charge and discharge rates. Sodium won't reliably park directly on carbon. It's unstable. So the carbon nano tube is wrapped with a second shell made of a durable titanium dioxide which sodium loves to stick to smoothly. When we charge at super fast 10 C speeds, the sodium doesn't form dangerous dendritic spikes. Instead, it gets neatly organized inside these billions of tiny parking spots within the nano tube lattice. It's safe, stable, and incredibly dense. The titanium dioxide nanoructures are a primary expertise of Nordic Nano's chief scientist, Dr. Bella. Without her recent breakthrough discoveries and innovations, the battery we are describing would not be possible. Titanium is tough, but sodium is likely the reactive substance mentioned in the job listing. If we want the 3D force to withstand sodium for 100,000 charge cycles, it has to be well protected. Another primary expertise of Dr. Bella is the application of a special atomic force field layer called an ADL which protects the nano tubes making a century long battery lifespan within the realm of possibility.
Traditional lithium ion batteries use toxic materials and a liquid electrolyte to prevent particles from easily flowing between the anode and cathode. A punctured electrolyte poses a fire risk and toxic vapor hazard. The doughnut lab battery uses a solid electrolyte, hence the term solid state. It contains no toxic materials and it is not flammable. One electrolyte material which could hit the targets is a ceramic plastic hybrid electrolyte nasicon which avoids toxic solvents. This particular option is doped with magnesium to reduce bottlenecks for sodium ions during charging and discharging helping the charging rates. An electrolyte changes volumes causing stress and forming imperfections which affect battery functionality. This battery could incorporate 10% plastic crystal filler such as su and a nitrial which adds a self-healing property. We aren't sure if this electrolyte would last 100,000 cycles without some kind of single crystal enhancement. suen a nitrial would violate donuts non-toxic claim and I'm not aware of any equally effective organic alternative in this category. Another option to improve electrolyte endurance could be an integrated boron nitride nano tube structure to reinforce the ceramic-l like rebar in concrete. High performance battery pioneer and Tesla research partner Dr. Jeff Dawn has researched this particular topic and famously pointed out that such structures can turn garbage into gold.
So far, we've speculated about the battery materials with some clues from job listings and the advertised characteristics. There are also many clues pointing at an unexpected manufacturing process. The job listing and early articles from Nordic Nano explicitly state that their batteries are made with screen printing techniques. The battery design we've suggested enables each part of the battery, including the anode, nano mass, electrolyte, and cathode could be applied in slurry form using screen printing methods as water-based inks. This is basically the same technology used to print t-shirts, but with high precision industrial-grade equipment. Printing the layers of this battery is fast rollto roll and uses far less energy on a much smaller footprint than today's autograde battery plants. This is all important for scale and time to market. It means construction can be performed in existing buildings and we think this chemistry could ultimately result in costs well below $100 per kilowatt hour. The simplicity and lower capital requirements could enable optimal productivity and return on investment much more quickly than today's gigafactories. The risk would also be lower for investors because the material supply chain is domestic and abundant. The screen printing method means an aluminum foil collector substrate can be cut into almost any shape or size before printing. Custom geometry enables energy to be stored within devices with far less wasted space. One example Nordic Nano used early on before they stopped advertising energy storage was having a battery size to match solar panels on the rooftop and installed directly behind the panel within the same panel frame. At the Consumer Electronic Show, Donut Lab showed a drone concept which used a ruggedized conformal cell as an exterior cladding. That kind of design optionality reduces part count, improves accessibility, and makes cooling a literal breeze.
We've described a screen printed solid state battery using an anodefree sodium metal arrangement based upon zero strain coaxial nano tube hosts. Our research shows this kind of battery meets all of Doughut Lab's advertised characteristics. Again, we're just a pair of regular people with a YouTube channel, so this is as far as we can go regarding the chemistry and manufacturing based on the information we have. We would love to learn more from accredited battery experts in the comments. We've included our layman's attempt at a conceptual white paper for this battery idea, process description, and costing information in the video description as well.
So, where is this all taking place? Tuomo and Marco have both said that production is happening now in our Gigafactory. Tuomo told us that it's taking place in a building just outside Helsinki. "Some distance away. We are having a building where we are making these batteries. We are not specially liking any visitors there and not specifying any address. Everybody wants to break in and and see what we are doing and how we are doing it. But surely we are having an address where we are there. Um we are having Finnish origin. We are mainly doing things in Estonia and UK but we are having this cell manufacturing first plant in Finland." The Nordic Nano's headquarters is this commercial building in Helsinki alongside other green energy companies including Finnish retail energy giant Umeies recently acquired Loom Energia which provides renewable energy solutions and EV charging infrastructure and Norse power which builds maritime rotor sales. We presume that the executives in charge of commercializing the academic research use that building. Research might also happen there, but we don't think that that's the right environment for production. We do not know for sure where production is actually taking place, but we do know where it had been intended to occur based on many public articles and disclosures. About 3 and 1/2 hours outside Helsinki in Tanala, just minutes away from the Russian border, Nordic Nano leases a 40,000 plus square foot building which once served as the Laplandia border market. Back in 2023, Finland closed the border with Russia due to unwanted immigration, which eliminated traffic and caused the vacancy. The city of Tanala lent funds to pay the building owner €400,000 for a 25% stake in the structure in order to secure the space for Nordic Nano, hoping the move will pay off with up to 200 manufacturing jobs awarded primarily to graduates of the local vocational school. The original plan was to have the pilot line up and running in that building by spring of 2025 at an estimated cost of €20 million.
During our recent interview, Twomo told us that they started producing viable cells in the fall of 2025, including the cells inside his personal Verge TS Pro motorcycle. That lines up with a pilot line operational within a factory with enough space for 1 gawatt hour of annual production. It is typical for there to be a lull between establishing reliable pilot production and the purchase, reception, and commissioning of the right commercial scale production equipment. In this timeline, that lull would land about now. What better time to raise the public profile and pump the brand. After all, the upcoming capital requirements for mass production could be more than 100 million euros. Publicizing the achievements and upcoming capabilities now increases the confidence of existing investors and attracts new ones with a long list of back orders. Donut Lab said they've received over 600 inquiries from businesses shortly after the battery announcement. Tuo told us that Verge TS Pro orders went from a long-standing average of about one per day to 50 plus per day during the Consumer Electronic Show, stemming from unprecedented media coverage. Swamo and Marco at Donut Lab have the marketing expertise, a flashy product which can grab headlines, battery module and pack assembly expertise and the right set of ingredients to brand and sell. While Nordic Nano expertise could be the enabler behind profitable production at scale.
After diving into the details to uncover the multi-year billionaire investment behind the operation, how the technology could possibly work with breakthrough chemistry and the possible requirements for manufacturing this type of battery, it seems there is a path to viability. That said, scaling this kind of manufacturing is a pioneering effort. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent by some of the world's largest corporations and governments to develop and scale technologically inferior lithium and sodium based battery technology. That kind of capital inertia has a track record of buying and burying disruptors, large and small. Government regulators could also inhibit the distribution of these batteries to protect their interests. To be clear, we think the idea is plausible and we remain skeptical. We did order a Verge TS Pro with a 33 kilwatt hour long range pack so we can see for ourselves. Based on our reservation date, Verge's head of marketing thought fall of 2026 would be a reasonable time for us to expect delivery. During our 30inut interview with Verge's CEO at CES 2026, he indicated that we'll be among the early owners. You can find a link to that video in this video's description.
We hope you found our speculative exploration of the Doughnut Lab solid state surprise to be interesting and thought-provoking. If you'd like us to keep producing in-depth content like this on the Miscoco Electric industry channel, please consider subscribing and sharing. For up totheminute weekly EV news, we'd recommend joining us at the main Miscoco Electric YouTube channel for our 10-minute weekly EV news program, The Current. You will also find detailed electric vehicle reviews, event coverage, and more fun topics like electric motorsport there. You can search our previous coverage, buy go electric merchandise, and find links to all of our social media profiles at ms golectric.com. Until next time, drive, fly, ride, go electric. Go electric.