Sodium is everywhere. It’s in our oceans and our food. And on a frigid, sunny day in early January, it is sprinkled all over the icy sidewalks of West Town, crunching with every step I take toward an unlabeled warehouse not far from Fulton Market that serves as the R&D site of the startup Bedrock Materials. If cofounder Spencer Gore’s vision comes to fruition, one day your car will be powered by sodium, too.

“If you break out a periodic table,” Gore tells me inside, “sodium is in the same column as lithium.” In other words, the two have similar behavioral properties. Problem is, lithium — the stuff used to make today’s EV batteries — is a thousand times rarer, making electric cars expensive to produce. “Until you can get a great EV for less than the price of a Toyota Camry, the job’s not done,” Gore says. That’s exactly what he hopes to facilitate by designing a scalable sodium-ion battery. No wonder, then, that Bedrock secured $9 million in seed funding last May and has signed letters of intent with two of the world’s six major battery producers.

The Naperville North grad has never shied from risk taking. During an internship at Tesla, he lived out of a 1983 mini motor home, calculating that the only way he could afford to work on the Model 3 battery while finishing up his undergrad degree was to camp in the company parking lot. Last May, Gore, 32, took another gamble by relocating Bedrock, which he launched in 2023, from Silicon Valley to Chicago. Returning to his hometown was a perk, but it was also a business decision: Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont has long been a hub of battery innovation. “There are more battery scientists per capita here than in just about the rest of the country,” Gore says. It’s one reason he’s already thinking bigger: “My mission is to turn Illinois and Chicago into as much of an energy and battery technology startup ecosystem as I possibly can.”