8inks: The Venture Leader Technology building the next-gen of lithium-ion batteries

23.03.2026 11:00, Rita Longobardi

Meet Leon Baade, founder of 8inks. The engineering startup offers a patented multi-layer curtain coating technology to battery makers and OEMs. Leon and the other nine Swiss National Technology Team members will fly to Silicon Valley in April.

Name: Leon Baade
Location: Zurich
Nationality: German
Graduated from: TUM
Prior role: Global Technical Account Manager - Google Cloud
Founding team members: Dr. Karl-Philipp Schlichting (Founder & COO), Dr. Paul Baade (Founder & CTO), Leon Baade (Founder & CEO)
Number of employees: 11 FTE
Money raised: CHF 7.2M


What does your product or solution do, and what makes it unique?
8inks invented a new production process for battery electrodes by radically rethinking the coating process. Our solution deposits multiple functional layers in one pass at scale, creating multilayer (3D) electrodes instead of today’s single-layer "2D" standard. This is unique because it enables 10x throughput and 30% cost savings while overcoming cell performance trade-offs (improving energy density, power density, lifetime, and safety) at the same time.

What trend or shift in your industry is currently creating the biggest opportunity for you?
The biggest opportunity is the booming battery market as we electrify our world. Existing players and new entrants need new ways to compete and differentiate. Our technology offers a crucial lever, multilayer electrode coating, to unlock significant battery improvements and factory competitiveness, giving battery designers and producers a vital edge in this dynamic environment.

How did the idea for your startup originate?
The technology originated from years of research at ETH Zurich led by our co-founder Dr Paul Baade. We later incorporated in December 2022 as an ETH spin-off.

Which market are you addressing, and what potential do you see for your startup in that market?
We see stationary and mobility batteries in Europe as our go-to-market, but we take a global perspective long term. Our technology is material and sector-agnostic, offering a versatile platform that unlocks battery improvements at scale. Licensing our production system and electrode designs is our long-term business model for global distribution.

What impact do you want your technology to have five years from now?
In five years, 8inks will provide coating solutions for Gigascale production for batteries that power the energy transition. We evolved from an innovation to an industrialization partner for the battery industry, enabling better and cheaper batteries globally by revolutionizing the most crucial part of their production line and the heart of every battery cell.

What major challenges have you faced so far?
Major challenges involve the industrialization of a new production system in a conservative and CAPEX-heavy industry. We have successfully mitigated this by:

> Designing a Plug-&-Play system requiring less than 1% machine change for adoption to de-risk factory integration.
> Securing early traction with industry leaders like automotive OEMs and global battery makers through paid PoCs and JDAs.
> Building out our own demo infrastructure, a 300m2 battery center with a pilot FOAK coater in Zurich, to de-risk the scale-up process together with customers.

Why did you decide to join the Venture Leaders Roadshow, and what are you most excited about?
We decided to join the Venture Leaders Roadshow to visit customers and investors from the region as we are closing our seed financing round. We are excited to travel with fellow entrepreneurs from Switzerland to the startup hotspot of the world, Silicon Valley.