Sila Nanotechnologies

Gene Berdichevsky holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. in engineering with a focus on energy and materials from Stanford University. He was Tesla's seventh employee and served as Principal Engineer on the Roadster battery — leading development of the world's first safe, mass-produced automotive lithium-ion battery system. He co-founded Sila Nanotechnologies in 2011 with Gleb Yushin and Alex Jacobs to replace graphite anodes with silicon-based materials that store more lithium. Sila's Titan Silicon anode material, launched commercially in 2023, delivers a greater than 20 percent energy density improvement and has been adopted in premium consumer electronics.

Gleb Yushin is a professor of materials science at Georgia Institute of Technology and Editor-in-Chief of Materials Today. He co-authored a landmark 2010 paper proposing internally porous silicon-based nanoparticles that could accommodate silicon's volume expansion during lithiation without cracking — the scientific insight behind Sila's anode chemistry. He co-founded Sila Nanotechnologies in 2011 with Gene Berdichevsky and Alex Jacobs. As CTO, Yushin bridges academic materials science and industrial battery engineering, and his Georgia Tech lab continues to inform Sila's research pipeline while the company scales its silicon anode production.

Alex Jacobs was a battery engineer at Tesla before co-founding Sila Nanotechnologies in 2011 alongside Gene Berdichevsky and Gleb Yushin. His engineering background in automotive lithium-ion cell development at Tesla complemented the scientific expertise of his co-founders, providing practical cell-integration knowledge during Sila's early development. As VP Engineering, Jacobs has led the process and manufacturing engineering that scales Sila's silicon-carbon composite anode from lab synthesis to commercial production quantities compatible with existing lithium-ion cell manufacturing lines.