Puheenaihe: Donut Lab is lying (Lauri Peltola): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-plYDcwvv4

Q&A Whistleblower Lauri Peltola: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPIB5XKDZcM

There is too much here to summarize well. It touches many threads worth commenting on. The points below are only a sample of what stood out to me in the new videos.

Secrecy and the record

• CT-Coating named, and a secrecy turn. Peltola named CT-Coating outright. He did not think this broke any trade secret, since the name is already public. He also finds the secrecy strange. For instance, the Donut Lab and NNG link was turned into a secret this year, even though the two announced their partnership last year. To me it is also confusing marketing. Local papers had reported on NNG since 2024. Anyone can read them now and learn the origin, the technology, and the plan. Those articles paint a clearer picture than Donut Lab ever did.

The specs, and who can actually check them

• He never weighed the cell. Peltola visited CT-Coating several times. But he never saw them to make a battery, never held a cell, and did not know its weight. So he never measured the real energy density himself. Here he makes an odd leap. Asked about the cell's weight, he points to deep-dive videos from Akkutohtori, Ziroth, and Two Bit Da Vinci, as if they could settle it. But those analyze the cell's chemistry and behavior from public data. None of them can weigh the cell, so from outside the energy density stays unverified. But that is a disclosure gap, not an impossibility.
• "Cannot be tested" is wrong for energy density. Peltola says in the Q&A that the most important properties cannot be tested. He says properties, but means two, energy density and cycle life, and of those only cycle life needs any real facility. For energy density "cannot be tested" is plainly wrong, since weighing a cell needs only a scale. And Donut Lab clearly ran its own tests. At CES booth videos showed climate-chamber cold + high temperature and fast-charge clips presumably from its pre-CES internal testing, so they certainly measured the energy density too without any difficulties. The real gap is that the number was never disclosed or independently checked, not that it could not be measured.
• No better evidence than any outsider. Peltola also softened his cycle-life criticism, once he saw the figure can only be a projection. No one runs 100,000 cycles to completion. The industry extrapolates them instead.

So, for all his inside access, his evidence on the two contested specs is no better than any outside critic's. His case rests on the same point they have made all along, that the on-going campaign have not yet showed the energy density or the cycle life. In the new videos he gives no detail on where the VTT-tested cells came from. Even thou he says technology comes from CT-Coating, he seems to believe, at times, batteries are not CT-Coating's. But the claims are contradicting and story is hard to read in one clear way.

Due diligence and the investor letters

• Nobody ran a real technical due diligence. Due diligence schema is a total mess when listening Peltola's description of it. NNG, in contact with CT-Coating since 2023, never ran a rigorous technical due diligence, but instead they had collected investor money from EU and ELY, hired researchers, employees, etc. when Peltola was on charge on the board from the beginning. They did not mind to know if the technology works at all. They had even trademarked NN Battery. Roschier, Donut Lab's legal office, did the financial and legal due diligence, but not the technical part. Siilasmaa, who was the main investor from Verge Motor angle, did not demand technical due diligence either, according to Peltola, even thou the anchor investors usually do. Siilasmaa is used as a crutch, even thou he participated Donut Lab before the battery business started. Being on the board as an anchor investor voice, he must not be ignorant of the development of the Donut Motor+OS+Battery platform however.
• Donut Lab's own due diligence. In a summer 2025 investor letter, Donut Lab said it had spent over nine months studying NNG's company and technology, in its words, "to determine whether everything works as it should," and it added that "risks still exist." That is its own due diligence toward NNG. Peltola says they started work together in the beginning of 2025, which is quarter of the year off according to the other accounts. Then, by Peltola, Donut Lab told NNG it had done the technical due diligence itself. In its own investor letters, Donut Lab described that review as thorough and hands-on, with visits to German test labs, its own experiments, and a review of certified third-party results. These could be SGS/TÜV evaluations.
• The money, not the specs. Peltola keeps pointing to the investor letters, but what he flags there is the money, not the specs. He points to the valuation scaling up several times over in a couple of months, the superlative hype, the urgency to get in before the next jump, and Siilasmaa's name used as a quality stamp. But read the letters closely. Both before and after CES, the letters lay out a staged plan. First a pre-production line, the one they say built the first working batteries for the prototype motorcycles in autumn 2025. Then a first official production facility, targeted for spring 2026 and rated at 300 MWh of cells a year. From there the plan is to scale from one line to five, then twenty, then a hundred, which would reach tens of GWh. Here is the irony. Peltola leans on them, yet he does not weigh what they actually say which are against his capacity and production readiness criminal report claim. They are fairly specific, and in places cautious, with that staged plan, the pre-production-versus-official split, and lines like "risks still exist."

Inside NNG

• The battery-team dodge. Peltola also will not engage one possibility, that he was simply not told about a second production site besides Imatra. Instead he disputes the battery-team point. In their joint statement, Donut Lab and NNG said he was not part of Donut Lab's battery-development team. His answer is that he could not have been, because NNG had no such team. But the statement was about Donut Lab's team, not NNG's, so the answer misses the point. And whether Donut Lab has such a team, he admits he cannot say. He is likely in the dark. Parjanen has said the battery is Donut Lab's own. Other option is of course that they made a "clever" rather consistent story that is impossible to falsify.
• The information clampdown. Peltola says that after Donut Lab arrived, information was filtered, so only the necessary people got it. That was the opposite of the old NNG. There the hierarchy was flat and the work was open. Peltola says those first years were a joy, and that it was his dream job. This also suggests he was left out of Donut Lab's side of the development, and its information, from early on. As head of NNG's sales, he was asked, in his words near enough required, to harmonize NNG's sales to Donut Lab's. He says he was not comfortable with that, since Donut Lab sold very differently, and he could not sell a product he believed did not exist. There might be a temporal issue however, since he got into the deep doubts only in March 2026. When was the harmonizing request done?

Faith and facts

• A religious undertone. Then he returns to a strange religious undertone he sees in the investor letters. He notes that the Finnish word for religion, uskonto, comes from the word for belief, uskoa. Business, he says, is about facts and knowledge. He tries to set the two against each other. But then he admits that start-ups also run on trust and belief. The argument is hard to follow. Still, with each revelation, it gets clearer that an ideological clash runs through the story. He says he would not call Donut Lab a cult. Yet he ended his latest episode, number 3, on the word "cult-ure", the very thing he claims to step away from.

"The battery does not exist"

• He contests only the two unmeasured specs. Peltola grants that VTT tested real, important things, like charge speed, hot and cold tolerance, and safety. It just did not test energy density or cycle life. And those two are exactly the specs his complaint contests. It does not claim the charge speed, the temperature tolerance, or the safety were faked, the things VTT did test. If the battery truly did not exist, those would be fair game too. By contesting only the two unmeasured specs, he loudly concedes the rest of the cell works, which cuts against his own headline. He also shifts between two claims, sometimes that the battery does not exist at all, sometimes the softer point that the battery with the claimed specs does not exist, and he has not settled on one. Story evolves as he confesses himself. On a battery version 2, he says he cannot know, since his termination on 4 May cut him off from anything after. Yet he also knows the cells were tested at VTT and ran in a Verge bike, and he says he sees no problem in the deep-dive analyses of the cell. That sits awkwardly with saying there is no working battery. He confirms the technology comes from CT-Coating, but now doubts it will ever deliver a real product. He is just as skeptical of NNG's solar side, which he calls questionable.
• Holyvolt, where the record contradicts him. His take on Holyvolt also goes odd direction. He guesses that Holyvolt left CT-Coating because the technology did not work, and moved to something that does. But Holyvolt uses the same screen-printing platform, now with Wildcat's chemistry. And its own audited 2024 annual report logs positive third-party battery-cell tests, by SGS and TÜV, in April and December 2024. The CT-Coating change was a joint-venture buyout plus a 73 million dollar chemistry deal, not a verdict that the tech fails. So the record contradicts Peltola. CT-Coating did make working batteries with Holyvolt, and Holyvolt stayed with that platform.

His stance and the legal fight

• He thinks it started honest. He is not entirely negative, though. Asked if Donut Lab was a scam from the start, he says no. He thinks it began sincere, and only later "leaned too far forward."
• The legal endgame. As for where this goes, he is seeking compensation for a dismissal he calls illegal. His logic runs like this. He filed first to the authorities, with a police criminal complaint, a report to the Financial Supervisory Authority, and a filing through the Chancellor of Justice's whistleblower channel. That, he says, had already triggered whistleblower protection. So the immediate-effect termination in early May, on what he calls fabricated trade-secret grounds, was unlawful. He also wants his case to set the first precedent under Finland's whistleblower-protection act. That law transposed the EU Whistleblower Directive, took effect only in early 2023, and has no Supreme Court or Supreme Administrative Court case law yet. He says he will see his case through to the end.
• The counter he won't engage. Peltola does not engage the other side's counter. NNG's lawyers argue that handing confidential material to the media is an improper disclosure of company secrets. That, they say, falls outside whistleblower protection. It is the stated basis for the 15 May Helsinki District Court injunction against him, which carries a 30,000 euro conditional fine. Whether a public or media disclosure is protected at all is the open legal question. He treats his own protection as already settled.
• A double standard. There is also a double standard in how he frames the fight. He claims the right to file complaints and run a public campaign against Donut Lab and NNG, but treats their legal response, the injunction and the complaint against him, as a revenge campaign, as if they had no right to defend themselves with their lawyer's advice.
• Hopeful framings. A couple of his own framings are more hopeful than settled. He says he went public to stop people investing on misleading information. Then, in the same breath, he admits the fundraising goes on and nothing stops it, only that more people now know. He also reads the home search, where police took his laptop and phone, as something that will speed up his own complaint. But that search was filed on an embezzlement ground, about returning company devices. It is just as likely that NNG is simply recovering its property. NNG CEO Parjanen, after all, says the company works closely with the authorities and hands over material when needed. Whether the search helps Peltola's own case is his hope.

Stepping back

Step back, and there is a small sign worth noting. He leans more and more on the investment angle, and less on the tech specs. That may be telling. Suppose the ramp-up plan and the V1/V2 versioning are real, and cycle life is extrapolated from shorter tests. Then the over-marketing claims do not hold up well. They start to dry out, and he needs another angle. In the end his real claims are few. They come down to the two headline specs, production readiness, and, only lately, his growing doubt that CT-Coating's line will deliver a real product at all, which would made all VTT tests unwarranted in one strike.

Peltola seems to be building and shifting his case as he goes, much as other critics have over the past few months. But that will raise the ultimate question, what is CT-Coatings role in all of this, how would the legal issues cascade over the countries? Dynamic Solar System solvency case took half decade to settle down, and it was mostly national. Finnish, Estonian, and German entities totally about a dozen companies counting holdings are now involved.

To be fair, Peltola has something no outside critic has. As an insider, he knows far more about how these companies actually work than anyone watching from outside. He has brought up details more than any one so far, even thou the central claims still seem thin without real evidence shown to audience. Access to first-hand history does not seem to save him from shaky conclusions, overreaching claims, and a fair share of misfires. More chatty he gets, more striking is the weirdness of the counter-story.