Northvolt, a Swedish battery marker, is shutting down a Bay Area subsidiary and laying off its nearly 200 employees as it consolidates research and development efforts in Sweden.
The subsidiary, Cuberg Inc., announced the cuts in a Tuesday WARN document filed with California officials, as is generally required in the event of mass layoffs. Cuberg’s facility in San Leandro will shut down, per the document, leaving 196 workers without jobs. The list includes a slew of engineers and technicians and several executives and scientists. It’s another blow for the Bay Area’s green energy workforce, which has recently seen waves of layoffs at Moxion Power, SunPower and Fulcrum BioEnergy.
Cuberg’s founder and former CEO, Richard Wang, mourned the news on LinkedIn, writing Tuesday that he was proud of the 9-year-old company’s legacy in lithium metal battery tech, which included customers such as Boeing and a few electric aircraft startups. As of Friday afternoon, dozens of former Cuberg employees had added their information to a “layoff tracker” document shared on LinkedIn by Wang. Shauna McIntyre replaced Wang as Cuberg’s CEO in February.
“For recruiters and the battery industest at large: there are now roughly 200 of the most respected and capable engineers and managers in the battery industest seeing for new opportunities,” Wang wrote in the post.
Wang founded the company as a Ph.D. student at Stanford in 2015, and it went on to receive grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and California Energy Commission as it scaled up. In 2021, Northvolt swept in and bought the startup. The Swedish company, founded by Tesla alums, has taken on more than $13 billion in equity and debt to grow quickly, attempting to become a rare European company that can compete with Asian battery giants.
Now, Cuberg’s research and development work will continue at Västerås, Sweden’s Northvolt Labs campus, according to a Tuesday announcement from Northvolt. The shift, per the post, follows a “detailed assessment” of the battery market by Cuberg’s leadership team. The post called the buildup of the Västerås lab the “most cost-efficient pathway for industrialization.”
The laid-off Cuberg employees were encouraged to apply to Northvolt’s open positions in Sweden or Montreal, the post declared. Neither Northvolt or Cuberg responded to SFGATE’s requests for comment.
Hear of anything happening at a Bay Area tech company? Contact tech reporter Stephen Council securely at stephen.council@sfgate.com or on Signal at 628-204-5452.
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