Lattice Graph × Form Energy

Lattice Graph operates a computational materials-discovery platform built around a knowledge graph that spans millions of compositions, connecting structure, thermodynamic properties, patent coverage, and synthesis routes in a single governed graph. For a company like Form Energy, where the entire economic thesis rests on the cost and reliability of earth-abundant inputs — iron, manganese, sodium, magnesium — that kind of graph is a genuine working tool, not a reference library. A chemist can start from an electrode or electrolyte formulation, query predicted formation energy and phonon stability, pull every patent that touches that composition-space, and surface synthesis routes, all in one traversal. The knowledge graph also carries one asset most public datasets never expose: a large atlas of labeled negative results from failed experiments, which lets a screening run prune dead-end chemistries before any lab time is committed. Validation is multi-engine and consensus-based. Every candidate material is evaluated across multiple independent physics engines — machine-learning interatomic potentials including MACE and CHGNet, plus density functional theory — and stability claims are only advanced when those engines agree. This matters acutely for earth-abundant battery programs, where a promising ionic conductor or cathode can look excellent in a single MLIP trajectory and then fail when DFT disagrees. Lattice Graph surfaces the trust and disagreement scores alongside each prediction, so Form's chemists can see exactly where the physics engines align and where they diverge before committing a formulation to synthesis. Cross-engine phonon stability and thermodynamic consensus, applied to the specific families of iron-polyanion, manganese-spinel, and sodium-thiophosphate chemistries Form cares about, is the computational foundation a gigawatt-hour manufacturing program actually needs for its screening decisions. Freedom-to-operate and patent whitespace are embedded in the same workflow, not bolted on as a separate legal step. The platform screens composition- and claim-level freedom to operate across more than 300,000 materials patents, which means a candidate electrode or electrolyte formulation can be assessed for IP exposure at the same moment it is assessed for stability. For Form, which is building an earth-abundant moat in a category now contested by sodium-ion, iron-sodium, and flow entrants, the ability to confirm that a chosen composition sits in defensible whitespace before filing or scaling is the difference between a wide moat and an expensive litigation exposure.

Form Energy is building multi-day energy storage on a chemistry that is deliberately low-cost and domestically available: iron oxidizes and reduces, and the cell runs on that cycle. The bet is not on exotic materials performance but on cost-per-delivered-kilowatt-hour across 100-plus hour discharge windows, which no lithium-ion cell can match at grid scale. That bet is now moving from lab to factory at the Weirton, West Virginia facility, and from factory to utility contracts. The transition from working chemistry to gigawatt-hour manufacturing is exactly the point where the materials pressures sharpen: inputs that seemed abundant in prototype quantities have to be procured, qualified, and sourced at scale without pulling a critical or imported material in through a binder, a conductivity additive, or a coating. Lattice Graph's position relative to Form is specific and three-dimensional. First, our solid-state battery electrolytes and interfaces portfolio contains earth-abundant and sodium-compatible electrode and electrolyte chemistries — including ordered manganese-magnesium spinel cathodes and dry-film sodium electrolytes — that are computationally validated, freedom-to-operate screened, and available for license or co-development. These are not adjacent chemistries; they are the earth-abundant, cobalt-free design space Form is trying to own. Second, our critical-mineral recovery and recycling separations portfolio addresses the supply-security and circularity dimension: as Weirton scales and as cells reach end of life, closed-loop domestic recovery protects the cost structure and satisfies the recycled-content and US-content requirements that utility buyers increasingly mandate. Third, the platform's freedom-to-operate and supply-risk intelligence APIs give Form ongoing coverage as the long-duration storage IP landscape fills in around it. There is also a near-term concrete wedge: Lattice Graph can serve as an NV013 Phase-II partner and provide a letter of support. That is a single engagement producing two distinct payoffs — a funded development relationship and an IP and data partnership — at a moment when the Phase-II window is open. The combination of licensed earth-abundant chemistry assets, real-time patent whitespace coverage, and supply-risk intelligence is the full-stack materials infrastructure behind an earth-abundant, US-manufactured energy storage program.

Form Energy is building multi-day energy storage on a chemistry that is deliberately low-cost and domestically available: iron oxidizes and reduces, and the cell runs on that cycle. The bet is not on exotic materials performance but on cost-per-delivered-kilowatt-hour across 100-plus hour discharge windows, which no lithium-ion cell can match at grid scale. That bet is now moving from lab to factory at the Weirton, West Virginia facility, and from factory to utility contracts. The transition from working chemistry to gigawatt-hour manufacturing is exactly the point where the materials pressures sharpen: inputs that seemed abundant in prototype quantities have to be procured, qualified, and sourced at scale without pulling a critical or imported material in through a binder, a conductivity additive, or a coating. Lattice Graph's position relative to Form is specific and three-dimensional. First, our solid-state battery electrolytes and interfaces portfolio contains earth-abundant and sodium-compatible electrode and electrolyte chemistries — including ordered manganese-magnesium spinel cathodes and dry-film sodium electrolytes — that are computationally validated, freedom-to-operate screened, and available for license or co-development. These are not adjacent chemistries; they are the earth-abundant, cobalt-free design space Form is trying to own. Second, our critical-mineral recovery and recycling separations portfolio addresses the supply-security and circularity dimension: as Weirton scales and as cells reach end of life, closed-loop domestic recovery protects the cost structure and satisfies the recycled-content and US-content requirements that utility buyers increasingly mandate. Third, the platform's freedom-to-operate and supply-risk intelligence APIs give Form ongoing coverage as the long-duration storage IP landscape fills in around it. There is also a near-term concrete wedge: Lattice Graph can serve as an NV013 Phase-II partner and provide a letter of support. That is a single engagement producing two distinct payoffs — a funded development relationship and an IP and data partnership — at a moment when the Phase-II window is open. The combination of licensed earth-abundant chemistry assets, real-time patent whitespace coverage, and supply-risk intelligence is the full-stack materials infrastructure behind an earth-abundant, US-manufactured energy storage program.

The most strategically weighted match for Form sits in our solid-state battery electrolytes and interfaces portfolio, which contains the earth-abundant electrode and electrolyte chemistries directly relevant to a low-cost, cobalt-free long-duration cell. The cation-ordered Li2MgMn3O8 spinel cathode is a manganese-magnesium system built exclusively from earth-abundant transition metals, with all-manganese-four-plus redox that avoids Jahn-Teller distortion and suppresses oxygen evolution across a wide voltage window. No exact-formula prior art was identified in the patent literature, and it carries a freedom-to-operate clean status against six classes of ordered-spinel art. For Form, whose cost thesis requires staying out of cobalt and nickel, this is either licensable next-generation electrode IP or a whitespace anchor for the earth-abundant cathode space. The dry-film divalent-doped sodium thiophosphate electrolyte system is the sodium-compatible complement: a solvent-free, scalable solid electrolyte with divalent doping that sits outside the published trivalent and tetravalent electrolyte patent families, explicitly developed for grid storage applications, and freedom-to-operate clean. As sodium-based long-duration competitors advance, holding a defensible position in dry-film sodium electrolyte chemistry widens the moat around earth-abundant-input grid cells. The critical-mineral recovery and recycling separations portfolio is the supply-security and feedstock-economics half of the story. An earth-abundant cell only stays cheap if its inputs stay sourced, domestically available, and free of critical-material concentration risk. The recovery and recycling assets in this portfolio — spanning selective chelating-resin platforms for critical-mineral oxocations from industrial waste streams and low-corrosion deep-eutectic-solvent routes for end-of-life battery black mass — address the circularity side of that equation. As Weirton scales toward gigawatt-hour volumes, a domestic, policy-aligned recovery loop for any critical species in the bill of materials is a direct cost hedge, and the recycled-content and US-content posture it enables strengthens Form's position with utility buyers and federal procurement partners. Together, the two portfolios give Form options at three points on its roadmap: offensive IP in earth-abundant electrode and electrolyte chemistry, defensive whitespace coverage as the long-duration storage category crowds, and supply-resilience tooling for protecting the economic foundation of a US manufacturing operation.

The day-to-day platform surfaces for Form center on the composition-intelligence and IP-screening workflows. An electrode chemist working on iron-polyanion or manganese-spinel variants can submit a formulation and receive back a predicted formation energy, multi-engine phonon stability with trust and disagreement flags, linked patent records, and candidate synthesis recipes — all in one report. Batch-screening mode is the right tool when the question is not about a single composition but about a family: sweeping dopant variants of an earth-abundant cathode or electrolyte, ranking survivors by thermodynamic stability and freedom-to-operate status, and filtering out the ones the failed-experiments atlas already marks as dead ends. That combination of batch screening against a labeled-negative knowledge base is the computational equivalent of running a materials informatics campaign with the failed literature already baked in. The knowledge-graph explorer and supply-risk dashboards are the strategic layer. The KG explorer lets a researcher traverse from a composition to its structural analogs, to the patents that claim those analogs, to the suppliers who produce the precursor elements — a connected view that is faster to navigate than assembling those signals from separate databases. The supply-risk views quantify element-level concentration and captivity scores so Form's procurement and strategy teams can see, at a glance, where a seemingly abundant input is actually a single-source or geographically concentrated risk. For a company managing both an R&D pipeline of earth-abundant chemistries and a US manufacturing scale-up, the platform's value is that the composition, IP, and supply signals all live in the same graph and can be queried together rather than reconciled after the fact.

Because Form's fit is asset-led, the natural engagement structure pairs an IP transaction on the matched portfolio with a data and API subscription that provides ongoing coverage. On the asset side, the earth-abundant electrode and electrolyte picks — the ordered manganese-magnesium spinel cathode, the dry-film sodium thiophosphate electrolyte system, and the high-conductivity sulfide electrolyte — are candidates for a license or a co-development arrangement, depending on Form's intended use. A license provides defensive coverage and design freedom around a validated, freedom-to-operate-clean composition. A co-development arrangement brings Lattice Graph's knowledge graph and multi-engine screening into the loop as a Form chemistry is extended toward production qualification, with shared deliverables at defined milestones. The supply-resilience assets in the critical-mineral recovery and recycling separations portfolio are suited to a license or option structure as a cost-and-circularity hedge on the Weirton feedstock supply. The near-term wedge with the clearest timeline is the NV013 Phase-II partnership opportunity. Lattice Graph can serve as a named Phase-II partner and provide a letter of support, which converts a single outreach into a funded development relationship and a commercial IP-and-data engagement simultaneously. On the data subscription side, access to the freedom-to-operate and patent-whitespace screening service and the supply and conversion-routes intelligence product provides Form's materials and strategy teams with ongoing coverage as the long-duration storage IP landscape evolves. Portfolio market-size estimates in the matched assets range from roughly one billion dollars to five billion dollars depending on the specific chemistry family and field of use; any license, co-development fee, or subscription is scoped to Form's specific intended use and volume and would be negotiated directly.