Before the boom, through it and beyond. Two decades of building the industry. Magnus™ is next.

Estes was founded in April 2024 by engineers who have built battery factories and electrified vehicles across multiple transportation modes – passenger car, on-highway (medium and heavy duty trucks, transit and coach buses) and off-highway (port equipment and construction equipment). The founding team is comprised of Dustin Grace (CEO, formerly Tesla), David Lai (Chief Engineer, formerly Tesla), Çağkan Yildiz (CTO, formerly Sila), and Tolga Yildiz (Head of Partnerships, formerly Cummins).

The Estes founding team brings decades of hands-on experience electrifying passenger cars and commercial vehicles and building battery factories at scale. CEO Dustin Grace spent nearly a decade at Tesla developing battery packs for the Roadster, Model S, Model X, and Model 3, before departing in 2015 to build Proterra's commercial battery development and manufacturing capability from the ground up. He served as CTO from 2020 through the company's 2021 IPO, continuing in that role until Proterra's 2023 restructuring and the subsequent acquisition of its battery division by Volvo Group. Estes CTO Çağkan Yildiz draws on broad experience across battery materials and systems engineering from roles at Cummins, Sila Nanotechnologies, and Proterra. Chief Engineer David Lai brings deep expertise across all aspects of battery development and testing, including five years at Tesla (2011–2016) followed by seven years leading Cell and Systems Engineering at Proterra (2016–2023). Head of Partnerships Tolga Yildiz built a billion-dollar sales pipeline at Proterra and brings corporate strategy experience from Cummins. Together, the team co-founded Estes in April 2024 to accelerate the US electrification market's inevitable transition away from fossil fuels, through disruptive performance and economics.

Estes is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Battery products are developed and manufactured in the United States from primarily US-sourced raw materials, cells, and components. Estes is currently evaluating sites to locate its second manufacturing facility across California, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado as it scales production to meet customer demand, weighing the optimal combination of workforce, infrastructure, and policy incentives to support long-term growth.

The distinction is process ownership. Most battery companies purchase cells, enclosures, and thermal components from upstream global suppliers and integrate them into a finished battery pack. The value-add is integration, not manufacturing. Estes starts further upstream, procuring raw magnesium and converting it into thermo-structures using metal mixing, forming, and coating processes that Estes developed and operates in-house. The resulting magnesium thermo-structure serves dual roles: as primary load-bearing enclosure and as the thermal management architecture of the pack. Integrating magnesium thermo-structures into high-voltage battery systems required Estes to develop a proprietary end-to-end manufacturing process. Without it, the Magnus™ platform could not be built. That is the practical definition of a manufacturer: the product required the process, and the process had to be invented.

Customers across rail, defense, aviation, and on- and off-highway markets face mounting pressure to demonstrate supply chain traceability and are actively seeking to reduce dependence on foreign-sourced critical materials and components. The regulatory environment is moving in one direction. Buy America Build America (BABA) requirements govern federally funded procurement across surface transportation. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) restricts Department of War (DoW) procurement of batteries containing materials or components sourced from foreign entities of concern. Non-FEOC mandates embedded in federal guidance are reshaping commercial battery supply chains as well. Across these frameworks, the common thread is the same: traceable, domestic sourcing is no longer a differentiator, it is a requirement. Magnus™ is built for this environment. US-sourced raw materials, US-developed technology and processes, US-based manufacturing. For customers navigating compliance obligations today (or anticipating them), Magnus™ removes the sourcing risk.