This is the first chapter of Cascade Materials, a fictional company we’ll be following over the next few months, told alongside a new blueprint series on modernizing how DOE funds American innovation. Check back as it grows.
Cascade Materials makes synthetic graphite, the material that goes inside the anode of nearly every lithium-ion battery. Today it comes almost entirely from China. Battery manufacturers have been asking for a domestic supply for years. If Cascade can build a plant, it has customers waiting.
The company is run by three founders. Two spent a decade focused on materials research at a large commercial company before they left to chase their startup dream. The third spent five years developing a lower-temperature catalyst for graphitization at a Department of Energy National Lab.
They have a process that works. They have interest from a private sector funder. They have several academic publications and the attention of people who evaluate technology solutions for a living.
What they do not have is financing for their first pilot-scale run of their technology, much less funding to go from pilot to commercial scale. Until they have the right type of catalytic funding to demonstrate that their novel graphite works, they cannot prove the process at the scale a customer will buy.
Welcome to the notorious valley of death—too unproven for private capital, too expensive for three people to build their way out of.
The Department of Energy (DOE) innovation funding helps bring big ideas to life, and historically, DOE has supported several solutions we utilize today, like the lithium-ion battery. An early Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARAPA-E) $24M award helped develop the battery technology it has been scaling ever since. NanoGraf’s silicon graphene solution started as a DOE business plan competition winner, and received multiple follow-on awards that led to its recent acquisition to scale further. The key is that federal money arrives at the point where private money will not, and jobs, companies, and industries get built as a result.
So Cascade puts its time and runway into seeking federal support, with no guarantee it will pay off. Finding the right opportunity takes multiple missteps and several application cycles, with many attempts going nowhere. Waiting anxiously for a decision takes six or more additional months. When Cascade is finally selected — a real win, and far from certain — negotiating the award to a fully signed agreement takes another six to eight months. If that wasn’t hard enough, getting the project funded and underway takes two more months after that.
It takes over two years to get to their first dollar.
Two years of delay means transformative technology sits stalled and unbuilt. It means Cascade drifts further from developing a manufacturing process at scale, while customers continue to be supplied from abroad for years to come. An American invention drifts further from becoming an American industry.
This is the state of America’s commercialization pipeline. Our best breakthroughs either stall before they reach the market, or someone else builds the industry around them, because the system that turns invention into industry moves at the pace of the last century, not this one.
Here’s the problem: it isn’t one fix, because it isn’t one open door. Cascade and countless other startups face a corridor of closed doors. Cascade must find the first door before it can apply for funds at all. The next door leads to where the application is judged. Then comes the door that leads to where the terms are set. And the door at the far end, where the work finally begins, won’t open until the others are unlocked.
The corridor is winding, unlit maze. A company cannot tell how many doors there are, what is behind the next one, or what it will take to get through. Each door opens differently, and none of them opens the way the last one did. There are firms who will help guide the way, which is why American startups pay consultants to guess at what their own government wants to support. For cash-strapped companies, even that workaround is often out of reach — leaving them to face the maze without a map at all.
It doesn’t have to be this way. DOE can support startups like Cascade in months instead of years, without sacrificing the integrity of the process.
This effort to map a new corridor kicks off CleanEcon’s four-part blueprint series tracing the federal awards lifecycle from a startup’s first contact with DOE to the final delivery of a project. The first, Opening the Front Door, publishes in September and starts with the entry point, making opportunities findable and applications survivable for startups. The three blueprints that follow take on the merit review process, selections and negotiations, and finally the management of a project once the award is made.
Each blueprint carries concrete recommendations, many of which DOE can put in place under existing authority, and each one addresses the challenges Cascade—and countless other startups—run into, costing them months of time or even the company.
Follow Cascade through all four stages and you will see how we can accelerate their pathway to commercialization.
Apply: The door you cannot find
It is midnight on Thursday and one of Cascade’s founders takes a break from lab work to scroll LinkedIn. A former colleague has posted about a DOE solicitation. The award would be enough to build the pilot line. The application deadline is in fifteen days.
Her reaction is both excitement and frustration. This opportunity has been open for months and it is aimed essentially at what Cascade does. But she found it by accident, at midnight, in an acquaintance’s social media feed. How could this be?
Opening the Front Door, publishing September 15, picks up right here.
*Note, Cascade Materials is a fictional company made up to walk through the DOE award lifecycle.
