Vivas KumarCo Founder

United States - San Francisco Bay Area

Vivas Kumar is a business leader and engineer with significant global executive and commercial experience across the electric vehicle and lithium-ion battery industries. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Mitra Chem, a company focused on 3 problems:

1. Shifting the Western electric vehicle and energy storage industries' battery portfolio towards better, safer, cheaper iron-based battery cathodes
2. Building production capacity in the USA to offset production asset overconcentration in China
3. Accelerating by >90% the lab-to-market timeline for a portfolio of battery materials through a proprietary machine learning advantage

Previously, Vivas was a senior manager in Tesla's Battery Team, where he was the lead commercial negotiator for strategic contracts representing billions of dollars in aggregate multi-year spend along the battery materials supply chain (the company's largest BOM category). Throughout his career, he has conducted commercial negotiations and handled partnerships with executive and senior government counterparties in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific.

A respected subject matter expert and accomplished public speaker, Vivas has been invited to deliver keynote speeches in mutiple languages on sustainability technology, lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles, and industrial-scale energy storage in several global venues, including The White House, The Pentagon, US Department of Energy, Atlantic Council, Stanford University, Fully Charged Live, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Society of Automotive Engineers, ET Auto Conclave, Panorama Minero, and many others. He has been regularly quoted by press publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Reuters, Economic Times, CleanTechnica, The Verge, Politico, Valor, NPR, HyperChange and many more. As a competitive public speaker, he became a Toastmasters International World Championship Semifinalist on his first try (Top 100 out of 35,000+ global competitors).

Vivas earned degrees in engineering at Rice University, and an MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is still actively involved at Rice University via mentoring students and, formerly through Board participation at the Rice Engineering Alumni and Association of Rice Alumni.

Vivas speaks fluent Spanish, Portuguese, Tamil, and basic Mandarin. He has lived in India, Singapore, New Zealand, and USA. He is a recognized champion for immigrants, health and fitness, and diversity. In his free time, he enjoys Indian food, electronic music, and NBA basketball.