For you and me, battery selection is a matter of AA, AAA—maybe C or D here and there. For a wearables startup with a valuation of $3.6 billion and looking to rival Fitbit, the process is a little more complex.

In September, Whoop became the first company to put next-gen battery-maker Sila Nanotechnologies’ new silicon-based battery in a commercial product. Sila’s energy-dense battery gave Whoop the ability to make a 33% smaller tracker with a host of new features, all without sacrificing battery power from the previous model.

• The battery will go in the Whoop 4.0 fitness tracker, which it uses in its wristbands as well as in Whoop Body, its line of body apparel, like boxers, bralettes, leggings, and performance tops, which include pockets to hold the tracker.
• The Sila-enabled devices started shipping in late September.

For Sila, which has raised over $880 million since its founding in 2011, this is the commercial start of (literally) bigger battery plans: Sila has joint ventures with BMW and Daimler, and it’s shooting to have its batteries in a commercially available EV by 2025.

We talked with Whoop cofounder and CTO John Capodilupo about how the partnership with Sila Technologies came to be. Read on for some quick excerpts, and click here to read the full conversion.

Why is Sila’s battery such a big deal for Whoop?

Batteries are by far the largest component by volume inside of any wearable. Really there hasn’t been too much advancement, maybe 2%-3% extra energy every year. For us, we wanted to make the Whoop 4.0 smaller, so that it accommodates more wrist sizes, looks sleeker, but also enables things like Whoop Body, making it easier to wear throughout the body. We knew a major constraint was finding the power to run all the things.

What separates Sila’s approach from other battery makers?

A lot of other next-generation battery technology developers are making their own factories to produce their own batteries. Sila is very unique in this regard that their chemistry is actually, you can think of it as like a drop-in for traditional chemistry. They don’t produce the entire battery cell.

We could still work with our tier one battery manufacturers that we’ve worked with in the past, but instead have Sila’s secret sauce inside of it to give us the extra energy density.

When you’re evaluating something as critical as a battery for both performance and a safety standpoint, taking a risk on a next-generation technology is one thing, but taking a risk on a next generation technology, plus the next generation manufacturing line from an unproven company producing batteries is a big jump to make.

Click here to read the full conversation.—JM

Last week was a big week for Wicked fans, crypto showdowns between city mayors, and...autonomous trucking?

Let’s drive into the latter.

Bye-bye, driver: On Wednesday, TuSimple, the San Diego–based self-driving truck startup, announced its plans to proceed with removing safety drivers from trucks on certain routes. It plans to test the program—which would involve no humans inside the vehicles, TechCrunch reported—before year-end, on 80-mile stints on Arizona public road.

• Keep in mind that most of TuSimple’s competition is only testing “driver-out” programs in controlled environments (Kodiak Robotics, Einride) or in the planning stages (Embark).

Hello, Driver: On Thursday, Aurora, the AV-tech startup founded by Google alumni, became the first autonomous vehicle company to go public via SPAC. This comes a week after releasing its AV tech platform, the “Aurora Driver,” in beta mode for the first time. (It’ll pull FedEx commercial loads in Texas.)

• Aurora has been open about its future lack of profitability: It expects to lose money until 2027 as it scales, The Verge reported.

Driver passenger: Today, Gatik, the middle-mile autonomous trucking company, announced its first fleet of “fully autonomous” trucks, which will move customer orders between a Walmart facility and neighborhood market in Arkansas.

Gatik’s definition of “fully autonomous” means driving on public roads with no safety driver behind the wheel—however, it’s important to note there is a human safety passenger with some control capabilities and the ability to stop the vehicle. There will also be a safety escort vehicle following each truck.

• “In December of last year, Gatik and Walmart together won the regulatory approval to actually take the driver out,” Gautam Narang, Gatik’s CEO and cofounder, told us. “If you look at the time to unmanned for this first market, it took us about 24 months….That time to unmanned is going to reduce over time.”

Big picture: In the autonomous trucking industry, everyone’s racing to roll out a newly minted “industry first”—for instance, to remove the safety driver under certain conditions, or to remove all humans from the vehicle.

But in the long-term, the companies that come out on top and make it through market consolidation may not be the ones who did something first; they’ll be the ones who did it big. And that means scaling up to handle top-dollar partnerships with big-box retailers and shipping giants.

Click here to view this story on-site.—HF

...that exceedingly few Emerging Tech Brew readers (literally, seven out of the 1,536 of you who responded to our poll) have ever received a delivery via drone. That’s about a half of one percent.

• Just 2% of you said you know someone who has received a drone delivery, whereas 89% don’t—the remaining 9% said ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Reminder: The question was prompted by Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery arm, announcing it will expand to the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The service passed the 100,000-total-deliveries milestone in late August, which is impressive, but Amazon delivered (on average) 11.5 million deliveries every single day in 2020.

All of this is to say,  while this was an informal, unscientific, just-for-fun reader poll—not a robust survey—it seems pretty aligned with reality in this case.

Next up: Click here to take this week’s poll, which is on wearables.—DM

Stat: Last week, nine space companies—including Boeing and Amazon—asked the FCC to approve a total of 38,000 new satellites, all for broadband networks. SpaceX, the satellite broadband leader, wasn’t in this group.

Quote: “Tesla maximizes use of electrons in the vehicle. No one does it better than they do. Their customers pay less for a better battery.”—Jim Farley, CEO of Ford Motors, at a company meeting discussing Tesla

Read: With the chip shortage, it’s shortages all the way down.

A delicious opportunity: Flippy, the AI-powered kitchen assistant robot, is really cookin’ now. With Inspire Brands—parent company of Buffalo Wild Wings—Flippy Wings is forecasted to increase food production speed by 10-20%. Don’t miss all the *chef’s kiss* potential: this investment opportunity ends November 18.*

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Today: Nvidia kicks off its annual tech conference, GTC, which runs through Thursday. Its 500+ sessions will cover robotics, autonomous vehicles, AI in art, and more. Expect big conversations on the future of computing—and what’s next for the metaverse.

All week: It’s the final week of COP26, and we’re now in the phase of the conference where details get ironed out. We’re continuing to pay attention to progress on big-picture pledges (like a global carbon tax and/or offset market) and the implications for new tech development.

Tuesday: Unity reports earnings. The company provides an easy-to-use software engine to clients, enabling them to create high-quality 3D media. It’s extremely popular with game developers. We’re curious to see if the company has made strides toward profitability, and how the metaverse buzz is affecting its business.

Late Friday night, it finally happened: The bipartisan infrastructure bill passed the House and made its way to Biden’s desk, whose response was “Finally, infrastructure week!”

The bill authorizes $550 billion in new spending to revitalize the country’s infrastructure, spanning from bridges to broadband. Here’s a quick roundup of stories we’ve written about how the bill will affect corners of the emerging tech world:

• The infrastructure bill gives up to $7.5 billion to EV chargers—here’s how it could shake out
• Electric bus makers are feeling optimistic about the infrastructure bill
• The nine words (in the final version of the infrastructure bill) that could determine crypto’s future

And here’s a solid overview—with even more links—about what the 2,740 page bill will do for tech.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• As wildfires grow more common and severe, tech startups say they can help
• SES says its next-gen battery could be in cars by 2025
• In record-breaking year for VC funding, climate tech is no exception