Let me clear some things up as I have experience with places like VTT (but not VTT specifically) in my career.
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.
Since they are testers and not auditors, what prevents Donut Labs from changing the actual battery sent for testing, selecting whatever works best for that specific test? In aggregate each test would seemingly validate their claims, only nobody ever validated and audited the fact that the same exact battery was used in all the tests.
As many have said, so many red flags around something so exceptionally revolutionary that you'd need extremely strong and unquestionably real proof.
This doesn't really follow the usual battery scam pattern, does it?
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.
Yeah, if it's a scam, at least we don't have to worry about it for too long. If we don't have third-party test results and/or the bikes in testers' hands in the next 37 days, then we can be pretty sure that it's just bogus.
I really want this to be true, but the founder launching AGI 9 months ago doesn't help their credibility a lot. And drip-marketing test results seems like a super weird thing to do, whether it's real or it's not.
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.
> Does anyone with more battery knowledge know if this could be some kind of supercapacitor hybrid being marketed as a solid-state battery?
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.
The electric motorbike company (Verge Motorcycles) owned by the same people also has such bad accounting/paperwork that they could not find an auditor willing to give an opinion.
"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).
To clarify some misconceptions regarding what they do and don't have in their current motorcycles, as of Feb 2026:
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.
It should be said that in the LinkedIn post announcing this the clams are much more moderate. Like “10% along what we consider to be AGI” and “lots of work left to do” if I remember correctly. How is that different from any other R&D company working on AI? They all claim to be on the path to AGI in some form
I don't know about that, the last 4 years everyone is selling magical AI and AGI is around the corner. Including every single top 10 rich people.
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?
It's nice that they have what they claim is a solid state battery. But having a small prototype isn't that big a deal at this point. All the major players have prototype solid state batteries that work. Nobody has volume production yet, and volume production seems to be hard and expensive, according to CATL and Samsung.
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]
Precisely. People are questioning the wrong things, I find it really easy to believe that Donut has a 400Wh/kg battery that can do 11C charging. Because that's something that can be easily externally verified, and they are sending that battery out to testers, and also because the existence of such a battery isn't new or shocking, many labs have prototypes in roughly the same performance envelope.
But that doesn't mean they have a winner, if the battery was ridiculously expensive to make. Their claims about cost are much more suspicious, and they have shown no proof about them.
First report for Donut lab battery is out. Here is the TLDR
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)
What was verified
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
Thermal Management
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
Missing claims
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.
But according to the company website another report will drop next monday (March 2nd).
It’s good to know that it does at least perform about as well as current conventional batteries. The energy density and cycle life were the really off-the-wall claims. It’s exciting to hear that they’re continuing to test, can’t wait for more third party results!
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
> Energy density: No weight and volume was mentioned
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.
Apparently the first 3rd party test was on fast charging and the 3rd party is VTT, which is the government affiliated(owned?) "VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland"
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.
> Apparently the first 3rd party test was on fast charging and the 3rd party is VTT, which is the government affiliated(owned?) "VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland"
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).
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.
I’ve been digging into the data (using Gemini and a few other sources). The claims behind https://idonutbelieve.com/ are pretty bold. I’d like to be optimistic, but I’m going to wait for more independent verification before drawing any conclusions.
Careful though, this test explicitly only tests the charge and discharge capabilities of the battery, not whether it's a solid state battery or not. According to ChatGPT, these results would in theory also be possible with a normal Li-ion battery. I am really hoping this is real though! And waiting for further tests.
> 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.
Good to have a VTT report confirming the charging speeds, but the actual differentiator would be the energy density I guess, given that BYD has already proven <10min charging with an LFP battery in an actual car. (https://volta.foundation/battery-report-2025/ pg. 161)
BYD needs to be heavily liquid cooled/thermally managed to achieve that. The Donut battery only had metal heat sink on two or even one side - and its performance was even higher at high temperatures. LFP doesn't behave like that, I think?
The massive amount of production-oriented research in solid state and semi solid state batteries indicates to me that this stuff is coming soon in a big way. I've been curious about buying an electric car recently, and if I buy one right now it would only be a used one, don't want to fully invest in something about to be obselete.
The whole industry is always working on improved batteries. But it's a long road from lab-scale to mass production, and often improvements in one area have downsides in another.
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.
I make the same argument when I buy a computer. If I just wait a little longer, there will be a faster cheaper version of what I can buy today. When buying anything that depreciates, the best strategy is to wait (possibly forever) and only buy when you really need it now.
Ziroth, an engineering YouTuber who pursued academic career in the related fields believe that this must be high end lithium cell due to the characteristic similarities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H45HXs4xXfA
Apart from metrics like energy density and cycle life, shouldn't we also consider idle self-discharge rate or charged-state longevity when evaluating batteries? No one seems to be talking about that in this case.
WarmWash|8 days ago
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.
ceoloide|7 days ago
As many have said, so many red flags around something so exceptionally revolutionary that you'd need extremely strong and unquestionably real proof.
PoignardAzur|7 days ago
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.
jlhawn|7 days ago
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?
Dockson|8 days ago
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.
Hamuko|8 days ago
skrebbel|8 days ago
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.
PoignardAzur|7 days ago
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.
pavlov|8 days ago
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.
doikor|8 days ago
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).
hipsdontlie|8 days ago
luka|7 days ago
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...
hipsdontlie|8 days ago
He's been a busy beaver!
audunw|7 days ago
patapong|8 days ago
mrtksn|8 days ago
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?
latchkey|7 days ago
skrebbel|8 days ago
Animats|7 days ago
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
[4] https://news.samsungsdi.com/global/articleView?seq=203
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuhapGSexyg
Tuna-Fish|7 days ago
But that doesn't mean they have a winner, if the battery was ridiculously expensive to make. Their claims about cost are much more suspicious, and they have shown no proof about them.
sagyam|8 days ago
Specs
What was verified Thermal Management Missing claims But according to the company website another report will drop next monday (March 2nd).taneq|8 days ago
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
PoignardAzur|7 days ago
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.
highvoltageguy|8 days ago
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mrtksn|8 days ago
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.
doikor|8 days ago
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).
https://www.vttresearch.com/en
scoot|8 days ago
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.
vipulbhj|8 days ago
patapong|8 days ago
kevlened|8 days ago
That's the same link. Is there a way to attest that this is an official VTT report?
xienze|8 days ago
> 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.
bizzleDawg|8 days ago
make_it_sure|8 days ago
klillas|8 days ago
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bmvw|8 days ago
donny2018|8 days ago
BYD needs to be heavily liquid cooled/thermally managed to achieve that. The Donut battery only had metal heat sink on two or even one side - and its performance was even higher at high temperatures. LFP doesn't behave like that, I think?
mech998877|8 days ago
stetrain|8 days ago
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.
fhdkweig|8 days ago
zemvpferreira|8 days ago
mrtksn|6 days ago
ChrisArchitect|7 days ago
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