Bristol-based battery tech startup Anaphite has raised £1.4m to boost its mission to decarbonise electric vehicle (EV) battery production by accelerating the industry’s shift to dry electrode coating.
The sum is a combination of £700,000 in grant funding from the Innovate UK Investor Partnerships: Clean Energy and Climate Technologies competition, plus £700,000 of aligned investment from climate-focused venture capital funds Elbow Beach and World Fund.
With the series A follow-on funding, Anaphite will expand its Dry Coating Precursor (DCP) technology platform that is used to engineer homogenous dry composite powders for the dry coating of NMC cathodes. This enables the high-throughput, high-yield production of dry coated LFP cathodes and graphite anodes.
Manufacturing LFP cathodes is more than twice as energy intensive per kWh of battery cells produced than for NMC cathodes featuring a medium-to-high nickel content.
Anaphite sees optimising the material mixing and electrode coating processes – which account for 30-40% of total cell manufacturing energy and cost – as a clear route to transformational cost and carbon footprint savings for battery cell makers and electric vehicle manufacturers (OEMs).
“We’re thrilled to have secured this grant support from Innovate UK and the matching investment from Elbow Beach, World Fund and other Anaphite investors,” says Joe Stevenson, CEO at Anaphite.
“This enables us to attack one of the toughest technical challenges in dry coating – successfully manufacturing LFP electrodes. Once achieved at scale, it will be enormously valuable to the industry.”
With batteries and the automotive industry highlighted as priority areas in the UK government’s Advanced Manufacturing Plan, this project will support the UK’s Industrial Strategy and drive further growth of a strategically important technology for global OEMs.
“Anaphite’s technology is broadly applicable across next-generation and established battery technologies alike,” says Craig Douglas, partner at World Fund. “This investment will enable the company to significantly expand its commercial capabilities, accelerating the scale-up of its manufacturing processes and driving down manufacturing costs for the global battery industry.”
