Enovix Corporation, Fremont, California, United States: Enovix: Raj Talluri, CEO & President

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Dr. Raj Talluri is president, chief executive officer, and a director of Enovix Corporation since joining the Company in January 2023. Dr. Talluri has led successful high-volume and highly profitable semiconductor businesses with a specific focus on the mobile consumer electronics market for nearly 30 years. He firmly believes that technological advances can improve people’s daily lives, so he is constantly looking for opportunities to develop breakthrough innovations that make lives easier and solve important problems in the world. As a visionary and technology futurist, Dr. Talluri has been laser-focused throughout his career on developing and producing technologies to enable experiences that he believed consumers would want three to four years down the road. Largely due to his vision and work at Qualcomm, Dr. Talluri is one of the people responsible for consumers enjoying high-resolution and sophisticated cameras on their smartphones today.

The next area Dr. Talluri is tackling is to build a better battery at Enovix. He recognizes the critical need for improved battery technology to power the technologies of the future, such as mobile, IoT, computing devices, and electric vehicles. Since Sony launched its video camcorder in 1991, the lithium-ion battery hasn’t advanced much. Dr. Talluri believes current battery technology limits the performance of current and future products including smartphones, laptops, and wearables. His vision of better battery technology will not only improve consumer experiences but also enable OEMs to take full advantage of their current devices and have a competitive advantage in the future. Dr. Talluri understands smartphone OEMs face a conundrum. Smartphone makers want to add more features to their phones, such as 4K and 8K video upload and download, multiplayer gaming and on-device AI, but that requires batteries with higher energy density and the battery can’t increase in size. Dr. Talluri and his work at Enovix is critical in helping smartphones and mobile devices advance.

Under Dr. Talluri’s leadership and technology vision, Enovix is innovating next-generation battery technology by creating a completely different battery that can manage high energy density materials due to its differentiated mechanical structure. Enovix’s unique battery technology and architecture increase energy density without compromising safety, which enables faster charging, improved battery capacity, and longer battery life. Enovix’s innovations in its next-generation silicon-anode, lithium-ion battery technology will give consumers the ability to take full advantage of the capabilities and performance of their current and future mobile devices. At the CES 2024 tradeshow in January, Enovix showed off a top-tier commercial smartphone running the latest Enovix battery, that demonstrated a 30% capacity advantage over today’s leading battery solutions. Enovix also demonstrated an action camera running on an Enovix IoT cell that boasted a 51% capacity advantage.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications and tools become more prevalent, Dr. Talluri is spending a lot of time thinking about AI, but from the perspective of power consumption. As applications leverage AI on mobile devices and increase processing power, the battery will continue to be a bottleneck. For example, some tests have demonstrated that up to 50% more battery runtime is required for AI to run effectively. Dr. Talluri is focused on driving Enovix’s battery development to enable the most sophisticated AI applications on mobile devices and subsequently open new opportunities for the industry.

Dr. Talluri holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, a Master of Engineering degree from Anna University in Chennai, India, and a Bachelor of Engineering from Andhra University in Waltair, India. He holds 13 patents in image processing, video compression and media processor architectures.

• When Dr. Raj Talluri became CEO of Enovix in January, he was challenged with taking an R&D-focused company with an innovative lithium-ion battery and manufacturing it at high volume. He immediately recognized Enovix needed to better understand its customers’ needs, as well as shift to high-volume manufacturing to build a sustainable business. Dr. Talluri understands the needs of mobile device OEMs and he recognized Enovix needed to move from a horizontal business strategy, focused on serving hundreds of customers, to a vertical strategy focused on a smaller group of very large customers. In his first year as CEO of the Company, Dr. Talluri implemented a plan to re-organize operations, manufacturing, and sales to place Enovix firmly on a growth path. 

• As a result of Dr. Talluri’s leadership and his efforts in driving his technology vision, Enovix made significant progress and achieved key milestones: 
   
  • Enovix received a purchase order to produce its BrakeFlow™-enabled battery cells for the U.S. Army and the Company started shipping product. Enovix batteries with BrakeFlow technology are the only next-generation, high energy density cells to pass the industry standard “nail penetration test,” according to Enovix customer Inventus Power. Inventus Power provides batteries to the U.S. Army’s military vests called the Conformable Wearable Battery (CWB). CWBs with Enovix battery cells have the potential to provide a dramatic increase in energy density supporting longer missions and powering more devices while decreasing the need for more batteries to lighten a soldier’s carrying load.
  • Enovix received positive feedback from Polaris, a third-party testing lab. Polaris was hired by a Tier-1 wearable company to evaluate advanced batteries for their next generation product. According to Polaris Labs, the Enovix cells not only met the customer’s performance specifications but also, “have shown the highest energy density among the cells evaluated,” and, “perform better than other silicon products we’ve assessed in our lab.”
  • Enovix’s IoT and wearable cell battery was selected for FDA-approved Accurate Meditech “Mini,” a multi-vital sign monitor, that will be sold at CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart in 2024.
  • As a result of Dr. Talluri’s meetings with leading smartphone companies in Asia, Enovix established engagements for smartphones with OEMs Xiaomi, Vivo, and Lenovo.
  • Enovix took important steps to prepare for high-volume production in Malaysia this year, including securing $70 million of non-dilutive local funding to support its first high-volume production line.
  • Enovix acquired Routejade, which will speed up Enovix’s product development, manufacturing efficiency, and reducing future capital expenditure needs by approximately $35 million for coating capacity.
  • Enovix announced the general availability of its IoT and wearable cells for smartwatches, headsets, and other IoT devices. This battery was chosen to be in Meditech’s FDA-approved blood pressure monitor.