Amprius CEO Tom Stepien at AUSA ‘It’s Going to Be the Decade of the Drone’

NYC listed Amprius Technologies provides batteries for electric mobility including for drones. Its CEO Tom Steppian was at the AUSA annual meeting and exposition and spoke more about its work with JD Durkin. Let's take a listen.

Drones are all the rage. Not just for warfare, but also for delivery, for inspection. They're drones tied into the 911 systems. Drones that use our batteries can fly 50 to 80% further because they have a silicon anode. Uh, and that allows them to accept a whole lot more lithium. This is your high school chemistry coming back to haunt you. Uh, compared to a graphite battery, and that has led to this terrific growth that we've seen this company and to enable missions around here, we're all worried about missions that were not able to be uh, realized with standard batteries.

To be fair, I did not do very well in high school chemistry. That's why I'm a broadcaster. So let me ask you a little bit more to better understand this. You recently introduced a battery with 500 watt hours per kilogram.

Yes.

Make that make sense for me, Tom. Why is that such a big deal?

Yeah, exactly. So, the analogy that we use is coffee. So, we all are familiar with standard drip coffee and espresso. They have the same amount of caffeine, same energy, but in a much smaller package. Or you got a double shot of espresso, same package, twice the energy. So 500 watt hour, that's energy per kilogram, that's mass allows you to be above the 300, 350 watt hours that standard batteries have. So, oh my gosh, you have 80% more energy in the same mass, the same weight, right? So, you got more, you got more energy in the, in the container, right, with the double espresso. That that's what allows our batteries to fly twice as far compared to other drones that have other, other, uh, graphite batteries.

And as you talk with your customer base here at AUSA and around the world, what are defense customers really looking for in terms of latest cutting edge battery technology today?

Yeah. They need batteries like those that Amprius offers. They also need batteries made inside the US, right? So there's a big effort underway. You taxpayers have funded Amprius by helping us build a pilot line in California with some defense innovation unit funding. And two weeks ago, we announced a really nice grant of $75 million to build batteries at scale in the Southeast US, using the a Korean manufacturer, a top quality Korean manufacturing muscle. That's what this industry needs is batteries with technology like ours, with a supply chain that's in the US, South Korea, uh, Japan, US, but also assembled in the US because the National Defense Authorization Act, another quiz, uh, is important in order to uh, provide batteries that the government wants to use in their systems.

I was a better high school student in government. So that topic I know I know quite a fair bit better. You mentioned receiving support from the taxpayers in California. You've also got support from the Pentagon. What has that allowed you to do to more effectively scale your needed production?

Yeah. Acceleration. The funds that we have received allow us to go faster, to innovate more rapidly, and to get batteries like we develop in the lab out to customers in shows like this, much faster than we could otherwise.

Before I let you go, talk to me about where you see some of the biggest opportunities for Amprius coming up down the pike in really just the next few years, Tom?

Yeah. So, we're going to do around $140 million of revenue in calendar 2026. That's up about 2X from 2025 and in 25 we're about 3X. So on this terrific growth path, triple, triple, double double. So we want to continue to grow. Um, most of our revenue is going to Europe because there's some skirmishes and other things over there, maybe you've read about that. Um that is now also growing in the US. But in addition to some of the uh drones used in warfare, there are drones that I mentioned at the beginning that are delivering uh groceries for us, that are inspecting buildings, that are tied into the 911 systems around the world. Uh, and they are so asymmetric in terms of what they provide. It's so much less expensive to have a drone, try to find a lost kid, is a beautiful story about that, than getting helicopters out there. or drones looking at the Strait of Hormuz for days at a time, than to fly F-16s back and forth. So, this, this drone super cycle that many people have called it is, it's early. It's going to be the decade of the drone.