Emily Litt, Dragonfly Energy — Safer Batteries and the Road to Solid-State

Dragonfly Energy's Director of Product Development on building safer lithium-ion batteries - and why solid-state is the only real end goal.

Mike Norton and Jackson Lyons sit down with Emily Litt, Director of Product Development at Dragonfly Energy - a Nevada-based battery company that's been making lithium-ion packs for off-grid applications since 2012, and quietly building toward something much bigger.

Emily's background is anything but linear. A decade leading sales and marketing teams, then a deliberate decision to retrain in materials science because she wanted to work on something that genuinely mattered. She joined Dragonfly as an intern, held every role in the R&D lab, and is now directing product development for a publicly traded company with a patented dry electrode manufacturing process and solid-state batteries on the roadmap.

In this episode:

• Why Dragonfly's patented dry electrode process - which eliminates toxic solvents from battery manufacturing - was always designed for solid-state, not just cleaner lithium-ion

  
  

• The one word that drives every product decision at Dragonfly: safety

  
  

• How understanding what's happening at the electrochemical level inside a cell is what makes genuinely innovative product development possible

  
  

• Why the Lithium Loop forming in Reno, Nevada is one of the most exciting developments in US battery supply chains right now

  
  

• What it actually means to work at a company where your opinion counts even as an intern - and why that culture translates into better products

  
  

• Dragonfly's take on the US supply chain challenge and why vertical integration matters

  
  

Plus: Emily's honest perspective on the non-linear career path, and why the skills she built outside of tech turned out to be some of the most valuable she has.

Emily Litt | LinkedIn 

(36) Dragonfly Energy Corporation: Overview | LinkedIn