Interviewee
Co-Founder and CEO at @ReJoule. Passionate and committed to building a sustainable future.As a specialist in battery management systems and power electronics for electric vehicles, He also helps to drive ReJoule's core technology development.
Transcript
Steven Chung: So, hi everyone, I'm Steven Chung, the CEO at ReJoule. We are a battery diagnostic startup company here in southern California in the LA area. And my background is in electrical engineering. So I have a master's from the University of Toronto. I got my bachelor's in uc, Irvine. And prior to doing Reju, I also worked in the defense industry. We were doing battery systems for navy ships and submarines. So that was some good real world experience for me. And I really got excited about electric vehicles relatively early on, was following Tesla as it was, you know, well before it became a household name. And then in grad school I came across this idea of reusing batteries, electric vehicle batteries. And, and that's really what Reju is trying to solve is this looming problem of all these, all the battery waste coming from these electric vehicles. And you know, we, we see, at least here in California, we see Teslas everywhere, more and more electric vehicles. There's a lot of batteries in them and we gotta figure out what to do with them once those batteries are no longer useful in that, in that electric vehicle. And so one of the things that I'm extremely passionate about is figuring out, you know, what are the best ways to responsibly dispose of those batteries? And hopefully in most cases, we can actually reuse them and have that battery continue to provide useful life.
Elisa Muñoz: So you started as an electrical engineer? Yep. And then what happened? Like were you always interested in the environment?
Steven Chung: It was always something that was interesting to me. I always grew up thinking, you know, we put things back where we left them, don't take more than what you need. And so that was, you know, what, what drove a lot of my interest in doing sustainability. So not necessarily, oh, we need to save all the trees, but hey, this, what we're doing isn't sustainable. Let's figure out a better way to, you know, not just waste so much of, you know, resources and what we're doing.
Elisa Muñoz: You have been around for a couple of years now. How was your first experience getting the investors?
Steven Chung: Our first kind of money that we brought in from outside was actually from Grants. The National Science Foundation has their S B I R program. It took a few tries. There's a, there's a few years of figuring things out, but then after we got the first one, it kind of snowballed to, you know, getting 225,000 the first round. And then now we've raised over 5 million in grant funding from either the federal government or, or California state government. That first investment was definitely the toughest because, you know, investors don't like technical risk, but then the, the, the government is okay funding that. So we were able to, you know, survive and then eventually thrive off those government grants.
When you're talking to advisors or mentors, definitely listen to their point of view. But, ultimately the decision is yours to make. Cause,, hopefully you know more about your technology, your business, your product than anyone else.
Elisa Muñoz: Also, I know that you guys are supported by a lot of leading organizations in the same state. I didn't know that California was super invested in energy innovation.
Steven Chung: They, they're actually, it's really good to be a clean tech entrepreneur here in California because there's so many programs they actually put a lot of money in. One of our big grant projects is funded by the California Energy Commission and in that project we're actually, you know, taking used electric vehicle batteries. We've done the testing for them and we're gonna be putting them back onto the grid for grid resiliency to tackle the energy storage problems related. To the grid.
Elisa Muñoz: Now that we're talking about the product, I wanted to ask you, How does it actually work? I know that you guys like to run the test in less than five minutes, which I think is great because usually I believe it takes like 10 hours or something like that.
Steven Chung: Yeah, yeah. So, the traditional way to, you know, measure how healthy a battery is, is just to cycle it. You charge and discharge the battery depending on the equipment you have, it can take up to 10 hours and to, you know, even some protocols it can be a few days off, of testing. So our technology is based on a technique called electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. And so we didn't invent that technique. It's well known for the past few decades, but what we've done is we figured out a way to be able to perform that measurement at scale on larger batteries. And so we have a device that can plug into a battery, run that EIS test, and then we have some machine learning models on top of that that is able to predict the usable battery capacity based on the measurements from that test.
Elisa Muñoz: What would you say that it has been the biggest technical challenge that you have ever managed to solve?
Steven Chung: I would say the technical challenge. One of them that we're kind of experiencing is just, it's very difficult to, to find parts to, to meet the demand. And so, it's, you know, more of a supply chain logistics kind of thing. But that's been a big challenge, especially this year of finding the right parts to meet the demand. We actually have to redesign some of our systems right now because parts that we used in the past are no longer available.
Elisa Muñoz: Did you have any supply chain issues when 2020 arrived?
Steven Chung: No, I, I'd say the biggest issue during 2020 was actually just figuring out how to, how to work from home and, and, you know, have all our, all our systems online. You know, luckily we have a young team, everyone's used to using their computers and just texting each other on Slack.
But that was the bigger issue. We didn't really experience any supply chain shocks until a little bit later. You know, just the price of everything has gone up. Some of the projects that we're doing, I think the prices co the copper went up like four times in the matter of a few months. So, you know, just dealing with little things like that.
Elisa Muñoz: And I mean, I was wondering who your main customers are nowadays. Have they changed?
Steven Chung: Yeah, yeah. There, there's definitely been a few pivots. Our customers are anyone who has the responsibility to deal with batteries once they've been manufactured. So, you know, somebody who owns a battery. And then we can get a little bit more, more deep into that. There's, you know, there's some commercial electric vehicle companies where they kind of manage the, the life of the batteries and then they, they have to deal with, you know, do we recycle this battery or, or can we reuse it in a different application or can I remanufacture it, put it back into my vehicle? It's, it's those types of people we're, we're looking at selling technology to automakers and, and battery manufacturers at this point.
Elisa Muñoz: And one of the last questions, where do you see ReJoule in five years?
Steven Chung: Yeah, so we're, we're definitely angling ourselves to be kind of a battery testing standard for, for used batteries. So for things like remanufacturing and repurposing, we wanna be at the point where if I'm, you know, driving down the road and, and I see a, a, let's say a charging station with solar and battery, then we can say, Hey, you know, we, we helped put that, that battery in, in that, in that charging center.
Elisa Muñoz: Do you have any advice for future entrepreneurs or people starting on these paths?
Steven Chung: Yeah, definitely. I'd say for, you know, the, the listeners are, a lot of them may be technical, maybe engineers themselves. And I, I think the biggest advice for them is to talk to more people. You know, just have more conversations and try to learn as much from others as possible. That's something that I struggled with as an engineer. I wanted to kind of work in a lab and just, you know, solve a problem through, through, you know, sheer, sheer will and, and technical expertise. But that's not really how the world works. You need to talk to people, you need to provide a solution to, to a person.
So talk to as many people as possible. And then, the follow up to that is, you know, you can talk to as many people as possible, but you don't always have to listen to their advice because if you're, if you're doing something completely new, no one's done it before. And so when you're talking to advisors or mentors, you know, definitely listen to their point of view, but ultimately the decision is yours to make. Cuz you know, hopefully you know more about your technology, your business, your product than anyone else.
Elisa Muñoz: Thank you so much for that advice. I'm pretty sure that it's very helpful, especially for people who like or want to start a company like you. It was great having you here Steven.
Steven Chung: Yeah, thanks. It was a lot of fun to be here.
