Mana Battery's $10M Seed Ties Anode-Free Sodium Cells to a Saft Build

Mana Battery, the Broomfield, Colorado company that grew out of Chunmei Ban's mechanical engineering laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder, has raised $10M in a Seed round led by Voyager Ventures. Union Square Ventures and Buff Gold Ventures also participated, and Mana says cumulative funding has now passed $14M. The announcement arrived in October 2026. Publicly accessible primary sources establish the round's identity and participants but do not provide a precise spending allocation or a valuation.

Mana is developing two things at once. The first is an anode-free sodium-ion cell, assembled without conventional anode active material so that a sodium anode forms during initial operation. According to Mana's published development announcement, the design aims to improve energy density relative to conventional sodium-ion architectures while relying on a chemistry based on abundant materials. The second is an electrolyte business: liquid formulations intended for sodium-ion batteries across different chemistries, including cells that keep a hard carbon anode. That gives Mana a materials route into manufacturers that never adopt its full anode-free design.

The company's stated product strategy is to scale anode-free cells through partnerships with established cell manufacturers, concentrating its own effort on proprietary chemistry and design while drawing on manufacturing capacity elsewhere. Partner selection is therefore part of commercial development as much as engineering: a factory relationship determines where a formulation can be tested, refined and eventually qualified. The Saft agreement is the concrete example. The joint development agreement announced on August 3, 2026 pairs Mana's electrolyte and anode-free technology with Saft's design, prototyping, manufacturing, testing, qualification and market access capabilities. Saft is a TotalEnergies subsidiary, and the collaboration follows technical evaluation that began in 2025. The companies name defense, aerospace, rail, datacenter backup and industrial uninterruptible power supply systems as target applications — uses where temperature tolerance, standby behavior, safety and reliability have to be weighed against the equipment and operating conditions a cell is meant to serve. Financial terms of the Saft agreement were undisclosed, and the announcement describes development and validation rather than a completed customer qualification or a purchase order.

The commercial argument Mana makes is a cost one: it says its design can lower the bill of materials by 40% compared with low-cost Chinese lithium-ion batteries. That is a company comparison about materials, not an independently established reduction in the installed cost of a finished storage system. On the sampling side, Mana has reported shipments of 5 Ah anode-free prototype cells and multi-kilogram electrolyte samples — company-reported evaluation milestones, not evidence of completed commercial qualification or recognized sales.