William E. Ott
William E. (Bill) Ott is the President and CEO of ActaCell, Inc. which he co-founded in 2007 to commercialize next generation Li-Ion battery chemistries developed in Professor Ram Manthiram’s Lab at the University of Texas Austin material sciences program. Along with Dr. Manthiram and the University, ActaCell was formed specifically to focus on commercializing these breakthrough technologies in the emerging motive energy storage market.
Prior to ActaCell, Bill was an Entrepreneur in Residence with StarTECH Early Ventures based in both Austin and Dallas. STARTech Early Ventures was founded in 1997 as a business incubator to focus on developing technology-based start-up and entrepreneurial activity in North and Central Texas, specifically working with larger Venture Capital firms to streamline the process from idea to commercially successful company. Bill was involved in several early company formations including Mirage Networks and as CEO and founder of HyEnergy Systems.
Bill moved to Austin in 1997 to join Active Power as VP of Worldwide Field Operations. During his tenure at Active Power, he built the Sales, Service and Business Development organization prior to the company’s $1.8B IPO in August 2000. Active Power revolutionized the Flywheel Energy Storage market by creating a cost effective, integrated system that could effectively provide premium power with mechanical energy storage. Bill’s career includes other technology startups most notably Dallas based Convex Computer Corp (CNVX) that was later acquired by HP in 1994.
Bill obtained an MBA from the Trulaske School of Business at the University of Missouri at Columbia and holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri at Columbia.
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Dr. James R. Akridge
James (Jim) Akridge serves as president of JRA Advisors LLC and is engaged in consultation to the global battery, fuel cell and portable power markets on all aspects of corporate structure and staffing with concentration on technical hurdles of the development of battery cells and packs.
His specific technical expertise areas are: market size, pricing of battery cells and packs, raw material manufacture and cost, battery cell and battery pack production, quality, unit cell design, battery pack design, safety testing of cells and packs, electrochemistry of batteries, electrolytes, and other aspects of battery cells and battery packs from raw material to final customer application.
Jim also served as president and chief executive officer of Valence Technology and focused on the speed and quality of execution in delivering Saphion batteries to the marketplace. He has more than 25 years of general management, R&D and operations experience in the global battery industry and joined Valence from Sion Power Corporation. There, he had responsibility for all research and development operations, global intellectual property licensing, technology partnerships and joint ventures. During his 20 year tenure at Energizer Holdings, Inc., Jim held various management positions in research, development and operations and successfully transitioned lithium-ion technology from the laboratory to production and managed the transfer of various technologies to the Asia-Pacific region.
Jim obtained a PhD in electrochemistry from University of California-Santa Barbara and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from California State University-Fresno. He also has postdoctoral research experience in x-ray crystallography at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
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Edward B. Hill
Edward B. (Ned) Hill is a Managing Director with DFJ Mercury, a Texas-based seed and early-stage venture capital firm. Ned has nearly 20 years of experience as an operator, consultant, and investor in technology companies, with a particular focus on communications, computing, and data center technologies.
Prior to joining DFJ Mercury, Ned was with the venture capital firm Sternhill Partners where he worked closely with pioneering start-ups in important emerging markets including WiMAX (Navini Networks, acquired by Cisco); blade servers (RLX Technologies, acquired by Hewlett-Packard); and virtualization (Surgient). Prior to Sternhill, Ned was with BellSouth Internet Services, McKinsey & Company, and BroadBand Technologies, a start-up that went public in 1992.
Ned currently serves on the board of directors of ActaCell, as well as the Texas Venture Capital Association; and on the advisory boards of the Rice Alliance for Technology & Entrepreneurship and the Houston Technology Center’s IT Screening Committee.
Ned earned a Master of Business Administration from The Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College where he was named an Edward Tuck Scholar and a BS in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University.
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