Emilie Bodoin’s pride was visible as she walked on to the stage to collect the American Chemical Society’s 2025 Green Chemistry Challenge Award on behalf of Pure Lithium, a disruptive battery technology company that she founded just six years ago.
Proud but maybe not surprised. Emilie and her labor of love Pure Lithium has been on a roll of late, picking up awards and accolades and reaching key milestones in the development of what she believes will be a transformative battery innovation.
Emilie will be the first to heap praise on the scientists and technicians who helped make Pure Lithium what it is today, but as Chairman, CEO and holder of multiple battery technology patents, she is clearly the driving force behind the company’s success.
So who came first, the scientist or the tech startup entrepreneur? Emilie would say it all started with an almost obsessive curiosity.
Inception of the idea
From a young age in her native Detroit, Emilie’s driving force was solving the most complex problems she could find and setting herself ambitious goals. While that may seem like a natural road to scientific research, Emilie passed through many phases as many young people do. She
says she first wanted to be an astronaut, but that changed after she watched the Space Shuttle Challenger blow up on television as a young girl. Instead, the tragedy helped build her interest in problem-solving. How could such a minor problem result in such a tragic loss of life? Later, Emilie then wanted to be a human rights lawyer (“Madeleine Albright,” in her own words), then a physicist – anything that could present her with problems too big for others to solve.
After attending Carnegie-Mellon University, Emilie began her professional career in the challenging sector of corporate finance, learning the ropes of how businesses operate and gaining experience that would serve her when she started her own business. Emilie worked in several finance roles in New York City, serving latterly as the Chief Technology Officer for G.C. Andersen Partners, a boutique investment bank.
But her love for science and solving problems continued to call her. She moved on to Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois to work as Principal Investigator on a lithium metal production project. It was here that she began to really focus on the potential of lithium metal – long considered the ‘holy grail’ of energy storage – and was astounded that a lithium metal battery had never been successfully commercialised.
How to build a company
Emilie took the leap, and founded Pure Lithium in late 2019. Then, in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she began raising her company’s successful Series A investment round.
Armed with her scientific background and having already received backing from billionaire Robert Friedland, Emilie steamed ahead with Pure Lithium’s R&D phase to find out how to unlock the full potential of lithium metal.
After recruiting a world-class research and development team, Emilie worked on one of the biggest obstacles. Lithium metal is notoriously expensive and energy-intensive to produce; it is easily damaged in transportation and its production relies on intercontinental supply chains. You could build a lithium-metal battery but it would cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per unit.
The breakthrough was Pure Lithium’s proprietary Brine to Battery technology, which allowed the company to produce inexpensive, high-purity lithium metal and electrodeposit it onto a copper plate to create the battery anode in one step. This was a massive savings in cost, time and energy, but it was still only part of the battery. Emilie reached out to Nobel Laureate Sir M. Stanley Wittingham to invent the other key component of the battery, the cathode. After experimenting with different materials, the pair came up with the idea of using a vanadium cathode, which proved to be the perfect fit.
Combining these two technologies enabled the creation of a battery that could be built without relying on far-flung global supply chains for materials such as graphite, nickel, cobalt or manganese. The two principal materials, lithium brines and vanadium oxide, are readily available in the U.S. and are generally located close to each other in different parts of the world.
Finally Emilie had a lithium metal battery that was outscoring the lithium-ion in every single metric, and she began arming herself and her company with patents to protect her game-changing technology. With the research and testing of the battery completed, Emilie has just moved Pure Lithium to Chicago, where she has also bought a home, to begin the prototype phase of battery production on the way to full commercial production.
How to be an inclusive leader
From her time in corporate finance, Emilie learned that it is one thing to invent a great new product, but another to lead a team of people and to foster an ethos of inclusivity and diversity to spur innovation. As a woman in a traditionally male-dominated role, inclusivity and diversity are of paramount importance to her.
Emilie has surrounded herself at Pure Lithium with many strong and intelligent women, including her company’s director of battery engineering, director of corporate development, director of development, and lab manager. She also emphasises the importance of encouraging open communication at Pure Lithium. Emilie prides herself on ensuring that there are no walls up between her company’s daily operations staff and scientific department, so that all her employees are always up to date on what is going on throughout the company. She ensures that all of her employees are comfortable enough to see problems as opportunities for collaboration and success.
This culture of inclusivity and diversity that Emilie has created at Pure Lithium is what continues to drive her company toward full commercialisation of her game-changing battery technology.
Changing the game
Emilie’s goal is to completely supplant the lithium-ion battery, the most widely used rechargeable battery in the world right now, with something much more efficient and environmentally sound. Achieving that will be no small task, though, but Emilie doesn’t do small problems. She solves the problems that others feel are impossible.
