LiNa Energy has closed out a £3m late seed funding round, primarily from existing investors who continue to invest in the game-changing battery technology. This funding will accelerate their route to commercialisation, ahead of investing in the next scale of manufacturing facilities.
The £3m funding gives LiNa Energy the opportunity to focus for the next year on several activities: from accelerating the technology development, progressing manufacturing scale-up, delivering customer trial programmes including feasibility studies and co-testing with partners, to building a presence in India where LiNa has signed a Memorandum of understanding recently.
James Morrish, CFO of LiNa Energy, said: “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 £3m.”
Founder Dr Gene Lewis, said: “Our technology spun out of Lancaster University, and since 2017 we have been proudly flying the flag as a Lancaster company. Our local ties are embedded in the DNA of the business. We are delighted that this £3m funding will enable us to continue our local growth whilst also championing our sustainable technology that will help make net-zero 2050 a reality.”
This year’s late seed funding round builds on the foundation of the funding raised in October 2021 which enabled LiNa in a year to not only double their Lancaster R&D space to ~5,000 sqft by fitting out a new lab for cell assembly, quadruple cell testing capacity and invest in lab-based manufacturing processes and equipment to increase cell manufacturing capacity, but also grow the LiNa team to 29 people.
The Company expects to be launching a Series A in Q2 2023 to fund a pre-pilot line. This is critical to LiNa’s growth as the pre-pilot line will demonstrate the ability to manufacture batteries at consistent quality using automated processes and provide the capacity to meet the demands of customer trial programmes.
To date it has secured over £10.5m in equity seed funding and been awarded several prestigious grants; working with key partners including the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK, Faraday Battery Challenge, Innovate UK and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
LiNa began work on its novel battery technology as a spin-out of Lancaster University in 2017 and has led several grant research projects to progress and demonstrate the technology including a recent independently validated demonstration as part of Innovate UK’s Faraday Challenge of a kilowatt hour scale system inclusive of battery cells, battery management system, thermal management, module housing, and instrumentation.
