Like, EEStor or Nikola with big claims, timelines pushed years out, raise a ton of money, delay forever. Donut announced at CES and said bikes ship Q1 2026 which is weeks from now. They've raised ~€25M total (QuantumScape has burned through $1.5B+). And apparently they're not doing a big fundraise right now either.
If it's a scam it seems like a really bad strategy? You're basically setting a timer on your own credibility.
I've been reading around and the thing I keep landing on is the Nordic Nano connection. They're a Finnish nanotech company Donut invested in, and they published specs for a "bipolar electrostatic capacitor" with basically identical numbers - 400 Wh/kg, 100k cycles, fireproof. Does anyone with more battery knowledge know if this could be some kind of supercapacitor hybrid being marketed as a solid-state battery? The VTT report confirms fast charging works but doesn't say anything about energy density, cycle life, or what this thing actually is.
Seems like the energy density and cycle life reports (supposedly coming in the next few weeks) are going to be way more interesting than this one.
Don't forget that a lot of scams aren't initially on purpose. Eg Theranos by all accounts very gradually morphed from a mild "fake it till you make it" scheme (mild by Silicon Valley standards at least) into a full-blown scam over years of growth and funding, the lies needing to be deeper and deeper over time to cover up the earlier ones.
I guess all I'm trying to say is the fact that it's a bad strategy for a scam, doesn't really mean it's not a scam.
Those Verge motorcycles appear to actually exist and work though, so that's a data point in favour of this being real.
Yes, I want this too good to be true battery to be real and that's why I'm looking into such things but this claim is false.
He apparently launched "Artificially Superintelligence", which appears to be a marketing term for some architecture this company was working on. The "AGI" term seems to come from people who are going after this CEO.
I wasn't able to come up with people who claim that they were actually scammed, i.e. paid for a product that wasn't delivered or made an investment into something that doesn't exist.
This appears to be a much cleaner slate than the titans of AI. I'm inclined to believe that those alleged scams are not scams by SV standard.
All links were obtained from the CEO's LinkedIn page. The last one is definitely a scam. They ask for your money and promise that their magical algorithm will give you profit.
The first one has fake "featured in", Privacy Policy does not exist and almost all those websites were using Wordpress (perhaps made by the same guy?).
I don't think you actually did research on him.
I'm gonna ask the other way around. Name one successful product by the CEO that has reached mass production and you can get it right now.
Don't know how successful it was/is as a product though.
The guy changes the industry he's in as often to match what's currently popular.
A few Youtubers have pushed the "if it's not a scam, it's probably a novel capacitor" hypothesis, but in their video announcing this test series last weekend, Donut Labs claimed "it's not a capacitor", so I don't know what's going on.
The founders have sketchy track records. They do a carefully managed social media build-up. There are credible rumors that they’ve been simultaneously raising money by cold-calling moderately wealthy people around the country. (Finland has extremely little oversight for private fundraising; you can basically sell shares in your zero-revenue startup to grandma next door — as long as you’re careful about wording your claims as “projections”.)
So lots of red flags. Everyone would love it to be real of course because it’s been a long since Finland’s tech scene had a global hit like Nokia and Supercell… And perhaps the Donut founders are counting on that mood.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20205916 (article in Finnish)
"According to the auditor's report, no opinion was given on the company's financial statements because sufficient audit evidence was not available."
The company claims to have a couple million in inventory but no system saying anything about what is in their inventory, 300k in revenue in Finland without any papertrail of it actually happening, 2.5 million in R&D without any explanation/papertrail on what it was spent on (salaries? materials? machines?), etc.
Also the company has taken really expensive loans from family members of the leadership (12% interest which is way over the market rate).
Has no one bought one and torn it open yet?
> “The first customer deliveries will probably take place in April. There are production-related issues, getting subcontractors involved. Starting production. A lot depends on the goods and officials.”
Translated from: https://web.archive.org/web/20260204130446/https://www.kaupp...
This is absolutely a scam.
All of current existing Verge motorcycles have a "traditional" lithium ion ~20kWh battery pack[0], very much on par with competition in all specs. They do exist and a few indeed appear to be in owners' hands (according to Facebook Verge fangroup posts and pics), and they can be test ridden. One of their showrooms is in Valley Fair in San Jose, CA. I have tested one of them. It feels and seems to perform well, as advertized and as physics allow, despite the hubless engine and skepticism around that. However, the test ride was ~30 minutes and there's so few of those bikes out there, that there's virtually no data on longevity.
What currently does not exist is a Verge motorcycle with the battery that they claim to be testing here. They have announced that all their offerings will feature their solid state battery later this year, increasing the energy capacity to ~30kWh. That remains to be seen.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20260223173926/https://www.verge...
Mercedes has a test car with a solid state battery.[1] The battery is from Factorial Energy. There's only one such car, and they don't say how much it cost to make the prototype battery.
Ducati has a test motorcycle with a solid state battery.[2] The battery is from QuantumScape. There's only one such motorcycle.
Here's Fraunhofer IKTS making a solid state battery at lab scale.[3] The whole process is shown. Huge amount of effort to make one coin cell.
Samsung prototype.[4] Samsung has been talking about shipping tiny solid state batteries for wearables in 2026. Still too expensive for cell phones, which gives a sense of cost.
All the serious players can make a prototype by now. But the chemistry that's used for the prototypes may not be suitable for production. They have to balance capacity, weight, charge time, cycle life, manufacturing cost, and materials cost. (Samsung made a battery with a substantial silver content. It works, but that's not going to be a volume product)
These problems will be overcome, because throwing money at them works. The history of the tungsten-filament light bulb is worth reviewing. Making fine tungsten wire is very difficult. From 1913 to 2010, a huge plant in Euclid, Ohio, made most of the tungsten wire for light bulbs. There were a lot of process steps.[5]
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/02/24/mercedes-tests-first-solid-st...
[2] https://www.ducati.com/ww/en/news/ducati-s-electric-research...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5SVrp8N-1M
He's been a busy beaver!
Was this AI proven to be any more fake Than Sam Altman, Elon Musk or Dario Amodei's one? Did he took similar level of money and delivered less than the promised?
What's the scam exactly? They don't seem to claim AGI anyway, they say Artificial Super intelligence which is like every AI company claim.
You seem to be on a mission against this CEO, maybe you can clarify a bit more about the scams you believe he is committing?
The people listed on this report appear to be on LinkedIn, so I guess it will be easy to confirm if the test document is authentic.
The announcement of the test: https://youtu.be/d2QU_LpkSPs
Hopefully, soon we will find out if this seemingly "too good to be true" is a revolution or something else.
It is a govenrment owned non-profit company.
As one of its services it will independently verify your product/invention/whatever works as claimed (for a bunch of money).
VTT appear to be a solid institution, so we will find out soon I guess.
That's the same link. Is there a way to attest that this is an official VTT report?
Considering the amount of publicity this thing gets, VTT or the person will publicly refute it pretty soon if it's a fake.
BTW, the people who conducted the test appear to be on LinkedIn. I guess its pretty easy to confirm if the test on the company site is authentic.
edit: https://www.vttresearch.com/en/news-and-ideas/donut-lab-comm...
VTT would be more like "National Institute of Scientific Research"
He has an e-mail address and a phone number, I doubt that if the report is falsified it won't come out.
Promising the moon and stars just like with Donut.
Donut Labs also had a video presentation of some kind of automotive design software that also sounded too good to be true.
This guy is a serial scammer.
I think i will judge the battery and the magical AGI separately. The guy also sells magical motors that appear to be real with people riding motorbikes with those motors.
Actually, there are a bunch of other variables (energy density, stability, discharge current, etc. etc.), so the probability of a technology that improves one significantly without negatively affecting at least one other is vanishingly small. Hence the number of overhyped battery technologies that get reported but never productised.
Specs
26 Ah nominal capacity at 1C discharge rate
94 Wh nominal energy with 3.6V nominal voltage
Operates within 2.7V – 4.15V recommended range (max charging to 4.3V)
5C charging (130A): 0-80% in ~9.5 minutes, 0-100% in ~13.5 minutes
11C charging (286A): 0-80% in ~4.9 minutes, 0-100% in ~7.3 minutes
Successfully delivered 98.4-99.6% of charged capacity even after extreme 11C charging
Tested with both one-sided and two-sided heat sinks to simulate real-world conditions
With dual heat sinks: Peak temps of 47°C (5C) and 63°C (11C) — well within safe limits
With single heat sink: Reached 61.5°C (5C) and up to 89°C (11C) — still functional but approaching thermal limit
Energy density: No weight and volume was mentioned
Cycle life: VTT ran only 7 test cycles total.
Cost Claims: Nothing about cost is mentioned
Material Claims: No chemical analysis or materials analysis.
Extreme Temperature Performance: No cold weather testing. No high-temperature testing.
No abuse testing: No nail penetration, no overcharge, no short-circuit, no crush tests.
Note that the report includes some photos of the battery, so we can assume that it's not, like, several orders of magnitude larger than what they advertised.
EDIT: Honestly, I'm pretty excited. Even if their promises on cost and materials don't pan out and the lifetime turns out to be terrible, what they've just demonstrated is already a game-changer.
Edit: Reading the report, they talk about “charge capacity” (Amp hours in/out) efficiency of 98.4% to 99.6%, but this seems potentially misleading. The actual charge energy efficiency is more like 90%.
> Successfully delivered 98.4-99.6% of charged capacity even after extreme 11C charging
Note the Wh numbers for discharge vs. charge energy.
> Discharge capacity Charge capacity Discharge energy Charge energy
> Cycle 1 26.109 Ah 26.159 Ah 91.021 Wh 100.793 Wh
New generations of cells that improve energy density usually start out more expensive than existing chemistries, so they show up at the high end of the market first and work their way down.
If we do get truly improved solid-state batteries available in EVs in the next 5 years, it will likely start at the high end of the market and work its way down over many years to cheaper segments as production capacity ramps up. The base model EVs aren't going to suddenly have their batteries swapped out with ones that are twice as good for the same price.
Personally I bought my new laptop a month ago. Let's hope when I have to buy the next one this craziness will be history.
> This project included independent charging performance tests on the energy storage devices supplied by the customer, which the customer identified as solid-state battery cells.
> which the customer identified as solid-state battery cells.
VTT is a company that you pay to run tests for you. You bring them a product, tell them what tests you need done, and then they do them with honesty and expensive well calibrated gear. Frequently you also send engineers along with your product to provide on the spot support for the testing. It's very likely it was a Donut engineer who setup the cell, attached the heatsinks, adjusted the connections, etc. This is pretty standard, VTT just runs verified tests, they're not experts on your product. Then they give you an official honest report recapping the tests done and the results.
VTT is not an auditor for verifying claims, at least beyond the scope of the test you task them to do. They are a friendly business partner that you pay large amounts of money to for getting you verified tests done on your product.
I really cannot stress enough that VTT is not in it to disprove anything. It's incredibly suspect that in a battery capacity test, Donut did not have VTT verify cell weight or dimension. It's also important to understand that VTT would not request to do this either, because VTT just runs the tests you pay them to, as you tell them to do it. So if donut shows up with a different cell for each test, VTT would not skip a beat, because they are not auditing, they are just doing the tests they are paid to do.
Normally places like VTT thrive on compliance testing, where a regulation outlays the tests needed to be passed, and VTT provides the service of being the third party to run and sign off on those tests. Those tests are then submitted to the regulating body and they are the ones who pass/fail you, not VTT. They just do tests and collect money.
So Donut is writing their own "regulations" here, so they are just having VTT do whatever tests they want as they want them done.
The real test would be someone not affliated with donut taking one of these cells to VTT.
As many have said, so many red flags around something so exceptionally revolutionary that you'd need extremely strong and unquestionably real proof.
Let me put it this way - these labs are functionally pretty similar to a Qwest diagnostics or Lab Corp. Those places draw your blood and run tests on it. The prescription tells them the tests to do, and the doctor is the one who evaluates the results. The labs are just a dumb tool to do the testing as prescribed.
Donut in this case is writing their own prescription and then posting the results. Just like a lab, they don't interrogate you to see if you are manipulating your blood results. That's the doctor's job. And ultimately at the lab it's just a lowly tech going through the same motions they go through every day.
The report does include a few photos, and the battery does look pretty small on them? So I don't think there's foul play there.
It reminds me of E-cat. Anyone remembers cold fusion? They had same modus operandi. Lots of revolutionary claims but testing was so contrived and limited and lots of conditions that in the end no one was allowed to truly confirm it. .
This repeats the exact steps of that purported miraculous energy device.
There are a bunch of cutting edge cell technologies out there right now with gangbusters specs but have some kind of fatal flaw.
If Donut was serious they would put the full specs of the tested cell in each report, so people could have higher confidence that each tested cell is the same chemistry. VTT would have no issue weighing and measuring each cell before and after testing.
They would probably say this is because it's not a "battery capacity test" but a "charge performance test"
But I agree, when they eventually do have VTT perform a capacity test, how can we be sure that it's the same cell from the charge performance test?
I would imagine they will run the same tests again. Light testing for specific things during development or scaling, increased testing as you feel more confident in the product.