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Stable-state sodium-ion battery firm LiNa Vitality has closed out a £3-million (US$3.4-million) late seed funding spherical, primarily from current buyers. (Earlier publish.) This funding will speed up the trail to commercialization by means of growing a next-generation electrolyte, automating handbook processes to assemble extra cells, and carry out pre-FEED research forward of investing within the subsequent scale of producing amenities.
As well as, the funding offers LiNa Vitality to ship buyer trial packages together with feasibility research and co-testing with the Eden Mission and Garic, with whom they’ve MoUs in place to show its know-how in its beachhead functions. LiNA can even construct a presence in India the place LiNa has signed an MoU with Social Alpha to optimise product improvement for the India market and oversee battery cell testing and future pilot tasks.
LiNa’s battery cells make the most of confirmed Sodium-Metallic-Chloride chemistry in a planar design made potential with an ultra-thin stable ceramic electrolyte. LiNa’s solid-state ceramic electrolyte reduces ionic resistance and removes unproductive mass, unlocking a two-fold efficiency enchancment in power densities versus alternate options. Avoiding the necessity for typical flammable liquid electrolytes implies that LiNa cells are inherently secure.
This yr’s late seed funding spherical builds on the inspiration of the funding raised in October 2021 which targeted on two core actions: accelerating the know-how improvement and progressing commercialization actions.
This funding enabled LiNa in a yr to not solely double its R&D area to ~5,000 sqft by becoming out a brand new lab for cell meeting, quadruple cell testing capability and spend money on lab based mostly manufacturing processes and tools to extend cell manufacturing capability, but in addition develop the LiNa group to 29 individuals.
The corporate expects to be launching a Sequence A in Q2 2023 to fund a pre-pilot line. That is vital to LiNa’s progress because the pre-pilot line will show the flexibility to fabricate batteries at constant high quality utilizing automated processes and supply the capability to fulfill the calls for of buyer trial packages.
To this point the corporate has secured greater than £10.5 million (US$12 million) in fairness seed funding and been awarded a number of prestigious grants, working with key companions together with the Superior Propulsion Centre UK, Faraday Battery Problem, Innovate UK and the Division for Enterprise, Vitality & Industrial Technique.
LiNa started work on its novel battery know-how as a spin-out of Lancaster College in 2017 and has led a number of grant analysis tasks to progress and show the know-how together with a current independently validated demonstration as a part of Innovate UK’s Faraday Problem of a kilowatt hour scale system inclusive of battery cells, battery administration system, thermal administration, module housing, and instrumentation.
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