TENIX Battery Additive production is entering a new commercial phase as Ten-Nine Technologies expands output at its Tulsa, Oklahoma facility. With the battery industry accelerating its shift toward manganese-rich chemistries, the patented cathode additive — described by the company as “anti-aging for batteries” — is emerging as a key technology for longer-lasting, cooler-running, and more affordable energy storage.
What Is the TENIX Battery Additive?
Every time a battery charges and discharges, unwanted chemical by-products build up inside it. This is the same hidden process that makes a phone run hot, shrinks an electric vehicle’s range, sends a laptop back to the charger, and drains the punch from a power tool. For years, manufacturers simply accepted this degradation as an unavoidable cost of doing business.
TENIX stops that aging process at its source. The additive is blended directly into the cathode material during manufacturing, making up just 0.5 to 2 percent of the cathode’s weight — roughly 0.5 to 2 kilograms for every 100 kilograms of cathode, about the amount inside a typical EV battery pack.
Just as importantly, it drops straight into cathode production lines that manufacturers already run. There is no new equipment to install and no battery redesign required. At its current capacity of 100 tons, Ten-Nine can supply enough additive to treat between 50,000 and 200,000 typical EV battery packs.
Measurable Gains: More Cycles, Lower Cost, Less Heat
Independent, third-party testing puts hard numbers behind the performance story:
- 75% more charge-discharge cycles, extending a typical EV battery from a 150,000-mile warranty baseline to more than 265,000 miles
- Roughly 40% lower cost per kilowatt-hour delivered over the battery’s lifetime
- 10% lower internal resistance, enabling faster charging with less energy wasted as heat
- Around 40% less heat output across the battery’s lifetime
That last figure matters more every quarter, as AI-driven data centers push backup batteries harder than ever and thermal management becomes a defining design challenge.
Why Manganese-Rich Cathodes Need TENIX
The momentum around TENIX arrives at a pivotal moment. The industry is moving toward manganese-rich cathodes as a cheaper, more abundant, and more geographically secure alternative to the cobalt- and nickel-heavy chemistries that dominate today’s EV batteries.
Manganese is mined widely across Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Because supply is not concentrated in a handful of countries, manufacturers and policymakers face fewer geopolitical pressure points and a far more resilient supply chain.
Yet manganese-rich cathodes have long been held back by one stubborn weakness: poor cycle life. That is exactly the problem TENIX was engineered to solve. Ten-Nine believes the combination could reshape the global cathode supply chain the way lithium iron phosphate (LFP) did twenty years ago.
From a Tulsa Warehouse to the World’s Battery Lines
Paige Johnson, a chemist and the founder-CEO of Ten-Nine Technologies, started the company in 2014 in the back of a Tulsa warehouse with $100,000 from a local angel investor and four grams of material in a flask. Her instinct was simple: instead of building an entirely new battery to work around aging, fix the chemistry at its source.
The company’s name traces back to its original incorporation as “10-9 LLC.” 10⁻⁹ is nano — the scale of the surface chemistry Ten-Nine engineers — while 10⁹ is a billion, the number of lives Johnson believes better batteries can improve. That first $100,000 has since grown into $45 million raised to date, funding the transition from lab experiment to commercial-scale manufacturer.
Today, Ten-Nine is in evaluation trials with battery manufacturers that together represent more than half of the world’s battery production volume, and it is now accepting orders for 2026–27 delivery from its own Tulsa production facility.
Patents, Trials, and a Competitive Moat
Ten-Nine holds 67 granted patents protecting its core cathode chemistry and has no direct competitor offering a cathode additive of its kind. The nearest points of comparison — silicon anodes and solid-state electrolytes — solve different problems in different parts of the battery.
TENIX, by contrast, works across battery types used in every major sector: electric vehicles, defense equipment, power tools, and grid-scale energy storage.
The Road Ahead
As manganese-rich chemistries gain share and thermal limits tighten across EVs, data centers, and grid storage, a drop-in additive that extends life, cuts cost, and reduces heat arrives at exactly the right moment. For Ten-Nine, the next milestone is converting evaluation trials into long-term supply agreements — and turning a Tulsa-born chemistry into a global battery standard.
Key Takeaways
- TENIX is a patented cathode additive that stops battery aging at the source.
- It makes up only 0.5–2% of cathode weight and needs no new equipment or redesign.
- Testing shows 75% more cycles, ~40% lower lifetime cost per kWh, 10% lower resistance, and ~40% less heat.
- It unlocks the cost and supply-chain advantages of manganese-rich cathodes.
- Ten-Nine holds 67 granted patents and is in trials with manufacturers representing over half of global battery output.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does the TENIX Battery Additive do? It is blended into the cathode during manufacturing and disrupts the build-up of chemical decomposition products, giving batteries more power and a significantly longer life.
How much additive does a battery need? Only 0.5 to 2 percent of the cathode’s weight — about 0.5 to 2 kilograms per 100 kilograms of cathode material.
Do manufacturers need new equipment to adopt it? No. TENIX drops into existing cathode production lines with no redesign required.
Which batteries can use TENIX? Batteries for electric vehicles, defense equipment, power tools, and grid-scale energy storage.
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