QuantumScape’s Road to Commercialization

Founded in 2010, solid-state battery company QuantumScape [QS] began with a simple question: “can a licensing model be successful in the energy storage space?”

In the view of Kevin Hettrich, CFO at QuantumScape, the answer is “yes”. Given recent successes in partnerships and product demonstrations, the company has secured a considerable cash runway and is on track to deploy a technology that offers a number of benefits over traditional lithium ion batteries.  

Prior to becoming CFO, Hettrich served a number of roles at QuantumScape, including Vice President of Business Operations, Senior Director of Finance and Product Management, Director of Product Management and Manager of Product Management. He also worked as a private equity associate at Bain Capital, and a business analyst at McKinsey & Co. This wide range of experiences has been helpful for his current role, Hettrich says. “Having worn those hats for portions of time helps me understand different challenges and opportunities from different perspectives and more effectively work with my colleagues to try to make better holistic company decisions in my role as CFO.”

In the most recent episode of OPTO Sessions, Hettrich sits down to discuss the process of commercializing solid state batteries, and how partnerships are at the center of QuantumScape’s growth trajectory. 

Key Partners

Hettrich admits that, at the start, QuantumScape’s plan to build a viable solid-state battery was more of a hypothesis. “It wasn’t clear if a material existed, if that material could be made thin and continue to function, if it could be made larger, multi-layered, could be made continuously with no applied pressure, with no excess lithium.” 

QuantumScape’s success, however, is swiftly becoming less uncertain. At the 2025 IAA Auto Show in Munich, QuantumScape and PowerCo, Volkswagen’s [VWAGY] batter subsidiary, debuted a Ducati motorcycle powered by its QSC5 solid-state lithium-metal battery. 

Now, having demonstrated the viability of solid state batteries, the next step is clear: “to take that Ducati race bike and put it on the track.”

Even this is not the end of the road for QuantumScape’s battery cells. Next, “Volkswagen would like to put it into a larger prismatic can so they can use it more universally across their brands and models as part of their standardization.”

The firm aims to start series production of their solid-state lithium-metal battery technology with PowerCo “before the end of the decade”.

In July, the two companies expanded their partnership. Now, PowerCo could manufacturer as much as 80GWh of battery capacity using QuantumScape’s technology, enough to power one million vehicles per year. 

QuantumScape hopes to replicate the success of this partnership with other auto manufacturers. “From a corporate perspective, we aren’t a single-customer company. Success would involve striking similar magnitude deals as what we’ve done with Volkswagen PowerCo with other original equipment manufacturers.”

Beyond end-product partners, accessing the right suppliers is another element in QuantumScape’s master plan to expand its ecosystem. Ideally, “for a cell manufacturer who’s licensing our technology, we’d have a turnkey solution with the world’s finest partners they can use,” Hettrich says. In April 2025, the company announced a collaboration with Japanese ceramics manufacturing company Murata [MRAAY], and in September it announced a similar agreement with US manufacturer Corning [GLW].

While partnerships are likely to be central to the company’s long-term growth story, “there’s also a sweet spot with the number of partners,” Hettrich clarifies. “We want some choice for our cell manufacturers, but also we want it limited to [avoid] diffusion-type risk.”

Protecting IP

The Ducati race bike was not the only milestone the company has passed this year. Less flashy, but perhaps more importantly, in June QuantumScape scaled up its production capabilities by integrating its so-called Cobra separator process into battery cell production. Compared to the previous Raptor process, Cobra offers a 25x improvement in heat treatment speed and significantly shrinks the film start size, offering key advantages to scaling up battery production to commercial levels. 

“It’s not enough to have high performing cells,” Hettrich underlines. “You need to have a method of making cells at an automotive scale that we think can scale the rest of the way.” 

Financial scalability is another key concern. In June, QuantumScape expanded its partnership with PowerCo, allowing the former to operate as a technology licensing company and ensuring $131m to fund a scale-up of solid-state technology over the next two years. 

Under this structure, “our core deliverable is intellectual property to our partners,” Hettrich says, “once the license is granted, that’s where the bulk of the economic opportunity is.”

This also allows QuantumScape to be much more capital-efficient. “When we announced that,” Hettrich notes, “we removed the equivalent of half a billion dollars from our roadmap in terms of the need to raise money.”

With technology as complex as solid-state batteries, maintaining control over the production process is essential to ensuring a product works. “The materials, the process and the architecture are so tied together that when you change one, you end up tweaking the others … It has to be done under one roof.”

Patents are an essential part of QuantumScape’s business model. “We keep as trade secrets the things that can’t be reverse engineered when you take one of your cells and investigate it,” Hettrich explains. “Anything that can be reverse engineered, we file patents against because we’ve been first to the show. We have over 300 patents and patent applications.”

However, “it is somewhat contrary to IP protection to go into a licensing model.” To mitigate risk, he says, you have to ensure partners are on the same page. “The strategy there is to align incentives to make sure that there’s a very attractive business model available for both us and our partners so that they have the same incentives we do to care for and protect the IP.” 

When it comes down to it, Hettrich says, the process of developing these innovations is “difficult work, it’s challenging work, but if you persist at it, that’s how you create the learning curve.”

With business, as with engineering, success is about the right components combined in the right ways. “If we have speed, if we have innovation and if we have partner enablement, we expect to win.”