Entrepreneurship classes help PhD student develop battery startup

A team led by WashU engineering PhD student Rajeev Gopal is on its way to creating a better, less expensive replacement for lithium-ion batteries. Gopal credits his teachers and fellow classmates in WashU’s entrepreneurship classes with helping him get his idea out of the lab and on the path to a product.

“They ask you questions that you may have never even thought about, which is quite important,” he said. “When you want to take an idea from something that's just in your head or something that works in the lab to something bigger, you need to make sure that you've thought about all aspects of it.”

His startup Mattery recently won the fall 2024 Olin Cup pitch competition.

Lithium batteries are everywhere in modern life — you may be reading this story on a device powered by one right now. But using lithium comes with problems, including the scarcity of the necessary raw materials, environmental hazards, and poor performance in cold weather.

Gopal, a fifth-year PhD student at WashU’s McKelvey School of Engineering, has been working on a battery that would use sodium, which is far more plentiful and works better in the cold.

“Sodium isn't a new technology; it's been around,” he said. “But what our research has been able to do is make it competitive in terms of the amount of energy that can be stored, versus lithium. And in our lab, we’ve been able to achieve that.”

He said he first started thinking about how to apply that research success to an actual product during his Pivot 314 fellowship. The fellowship program gives PhD students from across WashU experiential learning opportunities with St. Louis organizations. Gopal said helping a local startup with its own project stirred his interest in entrepreneurship.

“It really sparked my desire to take (the battery idea) out of the lab and see if we can make it into something bigger,” Gopal said.

He enrolled in a series of entrepreneurship classes, including The Hatchery, a course taught by Olin Professor Doug Villhard that helps students as they research, develop, and pitch their business ideas. Gopal said the questions asked in The Hatchery helped him refine his business plan for Mattery. In addition, it helped him with customer discovery, since he plans to sell his battery to other companies for use in their products.

We were able to speak with people who potentially would use our product, and their knowledge was quite important in us defining what should we focus on, not only from the engineering side, but also from the business side of this venture.

—Rajeev Gopal

The experience in The Hatchery was also eye-opening for Seyed Mousavi, MBA 2025, who worked on Gopal’s team during The Hatchery’s Olin Cup competition.

“They were looking for a person on the business side and their idea was interesting to me,” Mousavi said. “So this was a good opportunity to get involved, to understand how to do the customer discovery, how to pivot from one idea to another, how to pitch.”

With The Hatchery behind him, Gopal and his team of engineers are continuing to work with Mattery. The next step is to make a larger, more usable version of his sodium battery (he likens the small test version from his initial research to a food sample at a grocery store).

“We now have to make a larger battery that demonstrates all the characteristics that a potential business or customer may need,” he said. “On the business side, we have to think of other aspects, like which beachhead market to tackle first, how to get that first customer in the door.”