I’ve been thinking about an Electrek article from two months ago. Quoting from the section “The man betting his reputation”, about why Donut Lab is not yet revealing its revolutionary solid-state battery chemistry:

We discussed it with Marko during our interview. His logic is that once the bikes ship, competitors will tear them down and figure it out anyway. But that won’t happen for another 10 weeks or so, and the head start is critical for a technology this disruptive.

In the meantime, Donut Lab’s goal with the announcement was to get the attention of OEMs and ship them battery packs for validation. Marko said:

We are right now shipping demo packs to OEMs under NDAs and under tight disclosures so that they can test that all of that is true, which serves our business very well [better than disclosing the chemistry].

But these programs with OEMs are likely to take a long time before they become public.

If we read the CEO’s quote literally, it appears that the current business of Donut Lab is not to manufacture and ship a motorcycle battery at scale. Rather, it is to forge secret, presumably exclusive partnerships with companies that make battery-enabled goods. NDAs and tight disclosures are the product being offered right now. For how long might that be able to be stretched out?

I asked Opus 4.6 for another “Finnish technology startup making impressive claims about its product’s capabilities and then failing to deliver,” and it pointed to Flow Computing, a spinoff of VTT Research which claimed in mid-2024 to have developed a chip architecture to boost CPU performance 100×. On a cursory search it looks like, as of January 2026, the startup was still “engaging with the world’s leading semiconductor technology companies.” Although, to be fair, they didn’t announce and then delay a specific shipping product.

Still, this does not bode well for actual consequences in terms of reputational damage or regulatory penalties for startups in Finland who string things along. In fact, Flow seems to still be receiving funding from a public Finnish org for business development purposes.

So what if Donut Lab tries a similar strategy? What would we expect to see in the near future? Here’s some armchair punditry: I’d predict announcements of impressive-sounding partnerships, primarily based in Finland or a similar regulatory environment. Then “deliveries” begin, with a strange lack of the revelations we’re hoping for. Bezos numbers (ex: 200% month-over-month), not hard shipment numbers. The drip of test results will slow even more, and Donut will announce high-profile new hires to help address “scale bottlenecks” in areas that sound suspiciously like fundamental engineering challenges. Perhaps they continue to announce new unrelated products, to widen their focus and seem more like a research lab, eventually becoming a PR mouthpiece for attracting tech talent to the country.

Even if that mostly doesn’t happen, I doubt this puzzle will be solved within two months, as much of the recent coverage is saying.