Lina Energy, a solid-state sodium-ion battery company, has secured a £3 million late seed funding round to accelerate the technology development and progressing commercialisation activities. The announcement comes over a year after raising £3.5 million in October last year.
James Morrish, CFO of LiNa Energy, says, “Receiving this investment enables us to build our team, develop our technology and finalise our scale-up plans ahead of a Series A round in mid-2023. We have a very exciting 18 months ahead. We are delighted to see our investors continue to support LiNa’s pioneering, cobalt and lithium free, low cost, safe, sustainable sodium battery technology, with a total investment of £3 million.”
With this funding, Lina Energy joins other startups, including Group14, tozero, Anaphite and others in revolutionising battery market.
How will the funding be used?
The fresh capital will accelerate the commercialisation by developing a next-generation electrolyte, automating manual processes to assemble more cells, and performing pre-FEED studies ahead of investing in the next scale of manufacturing facilities.
Further, the funds will help the company to deliver customer trial programmes, including feasibility studies and co-testing with the Eden Project and Garic, with whom we have MoUs in place to demonstrate our technology in our beachhead applications.
Next-gen battery technology
Founded in 2017 as a spin-out from Lancaster University, Lina Energy is commercialising a safe, cobalt and lithium-free solid-state sodium battery.
According to the company, it can potentially exceed lithium-ion and rest-of-market sodium-ion technologies on all performance measures and at the cost of less than $50/kWh.
As per the company’s claims, if scaled up, the LiNa Energy battery could save ~4.5bn tonnes of CO2 per annum by 2050, accelerating global efforts towards net zero.
In October 2021, the company received investment to double its Lancaster R&D space to around 5,000 sqft by fitting out a new lab for cell assembly, quadrupling cell testing capacity, and investing in lab-based manufacturing processes and equipment to increase cell manufacturing capacity.
The company plans to launch a Series A funding round in Q2 2023 to fund a pre-pilot line. The company has validated its technology independently at a kilowatt-hour system scale, including government lead projects with the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Innovate UK, and the Department for Transport.
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