Ten-Nine Technologies is moving TENIX, its patented battery cathode additive, into commercial-scale production as the industry accelerates its shift toward manganese-rich battery chemistries.

 

The Tulsa-based advanced materials company says TENIX can tackle one of the battery industry’s biggest challenges: degradation over repeated charge and discharge cycles.

 

Described by Ten-Nine as “anti-aging for batteries,” TENIX is blended directly into cathode material during manufacturing at concentrations of just 0.5–2% by weight. The company says the additive can be incorporated into existing cathode production lines without new equipment or a redesign of the battery.

 

Third-party testing cited by Ten-Nine found that batteries using TENIX delivered more than 75% additional charge-discharge cycles, extending a typical EV battery’s life from a 150,000-mile warranty baseline to more than 265,000 miles.

 

The company says the extended life could reduce the lifetime cost per kilowatt-hour by roughly 40%. TENIX also delivered a 10% reduction in internal resistance, which Ten-Nine says can enable faster charging and reduce energy lost as heat.

 

The thermal benefit could prove particularly important beyond electric vehicles. Ten-Nine says TENIX can reduce a battery’s heat output by around 40% over its lifetime, potentially addressing rising thermal-management demands from backup battery systems used by AI-driven data centers.

 

Ten-Nine is positioning TENIX alongside the battery industry’s growing interest in manganese-rich cathodes, which offer a potentially cheaper and more geographically diverse alternative to nickel- and cobalt-heavy chemistries.

 

Manganese is mined across Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, giving manufacturers a broader supply base than the more concentrated supply chains associated with nickel and cobalt.

 

But manganese-rich cathodes have faced a major obstacle: cycle life. That is precisely the problem Ten-Nine says TENIX is designed to address.

 

The company believes improved durability could help accelerate adoption of manganese-rich cathodes and potentially reshape the global cathode supply chain, much as lithium iron phosphate (LFP) transformed the market over the past two decades.

 

Paige Johnson, Founder and CEO of Ten-Nine Technologies, said: "Just like people, batteries age. Products of chemical decomposition build up during use, limiting a battery’s performance and lifetime, and until now that’s just been treated as an unavoidable cost of doing business. I’m a chemist so I wanted to fix that at the source rather than build a whole new battery to work around it. 

 

'TENIX has a unique surface chemistry that disrupts that aging process, giving batteries more power and significantly longer life. I started this company in the back of a warehouse in Tulsa with $100,000 and four grams of material in a flask. I never imagined we’d end up here, but I always believed that if the chemistry was right, it would matter to a lot of people’s lives. That’s still what gets me up in the morning.”

 

Ten-Nine says it is already conducting evaluation trials with battery manufacturers that collectively represent more than half of global battery production volume.

 

The company is now accepting orders for 2026–27 delivery from its production facility in Tulsa. Its current production capacity of 100 tons of TENIX is enough, according to the company, to treat between 50,000 and 200,000 typical EV battery packs, depending on the dosage used.