Bristol-based battery tech startup Anaphite has raised £1.4m to spice up its mission to decarbonise electrical car (EV) battery manufacturing by accelerating the trade’s shift to dry electrode coating.
The sum is a mixture of £700,000 in grant funding from the Innovate UK Investor Partnerships: Clear Vitality and Local weather Applied sciences competitors, plus £700,000 of aligned funding from climate-focused enterprise capital funds Elbow Seaside and World Fund.
With the sequence A follow-on funding, Anaphite will broaden its Dry Coating Precursor (DCP) expertise platform that’s used to engineer homogenous dry composite powders for the dry coating of NMC cathodes. This permits the high-throughput, high-yield manufacturing of dry coated LFP cathodes and graphite anodes.
Manufacturing LFP cathodes is greater than twice as power intensive per kWh of battery cells produced than for NMC cathodes that includes a medium-to-high nickel content material.
Anaphite sees optimising the fabric mixing and electrode coating processes – which account for 30-40% of complete cell manufacturing power and value – as a transparent path to transformational price and carbon footprint financial savings for battery cell makers and electrical car producers (OEMs).
“We’re thrilled to have secured this grant help from Innovate UK and the matching funding from Elbow Seaside, World Fund and different Anaphite buyers,” says Joe Stevenson, CEO at Anaphite.
“This permits us to assault one of many hardest technical challenges in dry coating – efficiently manufacturing LFP electrodes. As soon as achieved at scale, it will likely be enormously useful to the trade.”
With batteries and the automotive trade highlighted as precedence areas within the UK authorities’s Superior Manufacturing Plan, this venture will help the UK’s Industrial Technique and drive additional development of a strategically essential expertise for world OEMs.
“Anaphite’s expertise is broadly relevant throughout next-generation and established battery applied sciences alike,” says Craig Douglas, associate at World Fund. “This funding will allow the corporate to considerably broaden its industrial capabilities, accelerating the scale-up of its manufacturing processes and driving down manufacturing prices for the worldwide battery trade.”
