This week on the Ways to Wealth Podcast, Charlie speaks to Dr. Shalini Divya, CEO and founder of TasmanIon, a Wellington deep-tech company building rechargeable aluminium-ion batteries, batteries designed to be cheap, made from abundant materials, and crucially, unable to catch fire.

The headline is simple: a Tesla Powerwall costs somewhere between nine and twelve thousand US dollars. Shalini is building something that delivers the same energy storage for around $4,500, aimed first at the millions of households in India, Asia, and beyond who could never afford a Powerwall in the first place. For Shalini, this is personal. She grew up in energy poverty herself, and her ultimate goal is to see a safe, affordable battery in every home like the one she came from.

What makes her approach so refreshing is how clear-eyed she is about the endgame. She doesn’t want to build the next Tesla or Samsung. She wants one of them to acquire TasmanIon, because they already have the distribution and the R&D budgets to take the technology further and faster than she ever could alone. As she puts it, a billion dollars is just a number, what she really wants is for the tech to reach everyone.

After nine years, from a PhD in a Wellington lab to validated prototypes and an open seed round, Shalini is honest about the hard truths of deep tech: that the hardest part isn’t inventing the battery, it’s the years of commercialisation, safety testing, and timing that come after, and why, through all of it, the biggest lesson she’s learned is to be bold.

Watch every episode of the Ways to Wealth Podcast here: www.eccuity.com/podcasts

Learn more about Shalini here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shalini-divya/

Learn more about Shalini’s company here: https://www.tasmanion.com/

#waystowealth #batteries #cleanenergy #deeptech #startup #energystorage #tasmanion #entrepreneurship #nzbusiness #innovation #sustainability #powerwall #womenintech #wealthbuilding