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Lexington company gets a big charge out of batteries

Xconomy profiles CAMX Power, which is working to boost the power storage of lithium batteries. It's largely funded by Kenan Sahin, who made a bundle selling his eponymous software company to Lucent in 1999.

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A123 was chasing the electric car battery market before they ran out of cash and had to sell out. It has to be tough being in a very unpredictable market. You could come up with a very good battery and have a very difficult time selling it.
Good luck to these guys.

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(The original) A123 did not really "run out of cash" by accident or market misadventure. Their car-battery business was sexy and appealed to the media, and it's true that there had been setbacks. But they were hardly down and out of it.

However, it turned out that their tech was (is) really well suited for large scale energy-grid storage. And that attracted the interest of the Chinese, who were willing to pay big bucks for it.

But A123 was beholden to the US govt for at least half its startup dosh, so the founders had to run the ship aground first and declare bankruptcy before they could be allowed to sell it to the Chinese for 'salvage'. And that's what they did. All the top guys got massive paychecks and most of them are busy helping the Chinese build bigger better facilities. The new A123 is quite robust.

So winners = A123 founders and Chinese govt. Losers = lower eccelon types (ie young MIT trained engineers) and US taxpayers.

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