Cellmates provides a focused, expert-led exploration into battery tech, energy and storage in the US renewable energy sector - whether materials, manufacturing, testing & analytics, business models, policy, or recycling.
Co-hosts Mike and Jackson talk with the brightest minds in battery tech; featuring in-depth conversations with engineers, founders, researchers, and experts shaping the energy transition.
Key topics include battery innovation, grid-scale storage, clean energy policy, supply chain challenges, and the role of energy storage in decarbonization.
www.linkedin.com/company/lumicity/
Nishchay Chadha, Ace Green Recycling — Cleaner Battery Recycling and the Case Against the Smelting Furnace
Battery recycling startup Ace Green Recycling: building a cleaner, modular alternative to the smelting process that's been polluting the industry for decades.
Mike Norton and Jackson Lyons sit down with Nishchay Chadha, co-founder of Ace Green Recycling — a company that's been quietly doing battery recycling differently since 2019, and is now building its first US facility in Texas.
Nishchay's path to founding a battery recycling company started at the bottom of an IIT engineering ranking list, took him through commodity trading in Singapore, global recycling operations, and a chance encounter with a technologist co-founder who'd spent six years developing a process to eliminate the smelting furnace entirely.
The result: a room-temperature recycling process, no toxic slag, organic food-grade chemicals - and a business model built on licensing and supply chain before anyone else thought that was the right order of operations.
In this episode:
Why smelting is the defining problem of the battery recycling industry - and why most players haven't solved it
How Ace Green eliminated the furnace and runs a room-temperature process that produces no toxic solid waste
The Texas facility: Phase 1 at 30,000 tonnes per year, scalable to 150,000 tonnes - and why getting it operational is 90% of their current energy as a company
Why Ace Green switched from NMC to LFP recycling two and a half years ago - before the rest of the industry caught up
The uncomfortable truth about battery recycling investment: investors want billion-dollar spreadsheets, and that's pushed startups toward oversized plants that can't get feedstock
Why nobody is a competitor in this space - and what it actually looks like to run a recycling business as a platform
The human side of recycling: the children Nishchay saw working in global recycling operations, and why that's what actually drove him to start the company
One of the most grounded, opinionated conversations of Series 8.
Nishchay Chadha | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishchay-chadha-9855475/)(4) ACE Green Recycling, Inc.: Overview | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/ace-recycling-pte-ltd/)
7 Jul 2026
Virginia, Sylvatex - Building Cathode Materials Before Anyone Knew They Mattered
Sylvatex founder Virginia on building a battery cathode materials company ahead of the curve - and surviving long enough to be proved right.
Mike Norton and Jackson Lyons close out Series 8 with one of the most personal and most commercially sharp conversations of the whole series.
Virginia, founder of Sylvatex, has been building in the cathode active materials space since before it was considered interesting. What she's built, and how she's built it, is a case study in patience and conviction.
Virginia grew up in Bangkok, surrounded by diesel pollution at a level she describes as equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Her father was a chemist who pioneered low-emissions diesel fuel and biofuels. She started her career in medical devices. She walked away from all of it - a secure, well-paid, hard-to-get career - to start Sylvatex based on her father's work, after he passed away.
That's the foundation. Here's what she built on it:
Why cathode material is the highest-cost component of any battery - and why almost the entire global supply chain runs through a single region in China
Sylvatex's manufacturing-first, chemistry-agnostic approach: designed to work with locally available feedstocks, scalable to any region, using off-the-shelf equipment rather than novel machinery
Why battery materials should be thought of as commodities, like petrochemicals - and why regional production is the only way that makes long-term sense
How Sylvatex is positioned to qualify for IRA tax credits that most cathode manufacturers can't access — because their process is genuinely disconnected from Chinese precursor supply chains
What it looks like to survive the hype cycle without chasing disproportionate capital - and why that positions them better now that the bubble has burst
"If you're on the right side of history, you always win the long game."
Virginia is one of those founders who operates at a civilizational scale while staying completely clear-eyed about the next milestone. This is a conversation worth your time.
Virginia Klausmeier | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/virginia-klausmeier-2a34ab9/)
(36) Sylvatex (SVX): People | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/sylvatex/people/?viewAsMember=true)
23 Jun 2026
Jill Pestana, Pestana Solutions — Why Communication Is the Battery Industry's Missing Infrastructure
Battery industry consultant Jill Pestana: 15 years in the field, and one clear conviction - communication is as critical as the technology.
Mike Norton sits down with Jill Pestana, founder of Pestana Solutions - a strategic advising firm helping battery companies translate complex technology into messages that move investors, customers, and partners to act.
Jill's story is one of the most interesting in Series 8. Physics undergrad. NASA intern. Boeing. A pivot into electrochemistry and material science once she realized that batteries - not fuel cells - were going to define the energy transition. Years as a senior scientist working on silicon-dominant anodes, publishing patents, building expertise. Then Accenture, leading their North American battery consulting team. Then the moment where she had to choose: keep saying no to the battery companies knocking on her door, or start her own firm.
She started her own firm.
In this episode:
Why communication is the missing infrastructure in the battery industry - and why it matters as much as the technology itself
How Jill built one of the most recognized personal brands in the battery space - by accident, starting with a YouTube channel in 2018 before anyone else was doing it
Why 2025 wasn't a bust for the battery industry - it was a reset, and 2026 is where we find out whose plans actually hold
The Nano Battery Courses platform launching this spring - a lithium-ion fundamentals course designed to compress five years of industry learning into seven hours
Her role as Director of Research & Programming at NAATBatt, and the career pathways work happening across the US battery belt right now
Why the battery industry needs to think of itself as a community - and what it looks like when it actually does
This is a different kind of Cellmates conversation. No scale-up challenges or seed rounds - just an honest look at the human infrastructure the battery industry is still building around itself.
Jill Pestana | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jillpestana/)
(36) Pestana Solutions: Overview | LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/pestana-solutions/)
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Spotify
4.7 / 5
6 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 15 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
18
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
32
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