Khosla Ventures chair Vinod Khosla. Khosla is a board member at QuantumScape. Photo credit: JD Lasica on Flickr, under Creative Commons license

QuantumScape, a battery technology startup backed by investors including Bill Gates and German automaker Volkswagen, has reached a deal to go public via a reverse merger with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). The merger is expected to buffer QuantumScape’s balance sheet by more than $700 million and give it an initial market capitalization of $3.3 billion. As a private company, QuantumScape is known to have raised more than $300 million in funding, most of it from German automaker Volkswagen. Other notable investors in the San Jose, California-based company include venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and Khosla Ventures.

QuantumScape is a ten-year-old company that works on battery technology for electric vehicles. The company’s current team consists of more than 200 scientists and engineers. German automaker Volkswagen has been a major partner to QuantumScape since 2012. It’s such that the automaker has committed $300 million in funding for the company so far. A merger with Kensington Capital Acquisition Corp will see QuantumScape become publicly traded and give it ample capital to further its cause. The merger itself is expected to be completed in the second quarter of this year.