Elbow Beach Capital has led a £1.6m government-backed grant investment into Anaphite, a Bristol-based battery technology startup developing dry-coating technology to reduce the cost of EV battery manufacturing.
The overall funding consists of £685k grant funding via the Investor Partnerships Future Economy programme and over £880k committed by private investors.
In partnership with UK Research and Innovation’s (UKRI) Faraday Battery Challenge, the grant will enable Anaphite to accelerate the development of its dry-coating technology.
In a statement, Jon Pollock, CEO of Elbow Beach Capital, said: “We are delighted to have supported Anaphite in winning this grant funding which will accelerate the rollout of their technology which is a real enabler for accelerating EV adoption. We have seen that demand for EVs is price elastic, so reducing the cost of vehicles is essential to achieving their widescale rollout.”
Batteries account for up to 30 per cent of an EV’s total cost, making the reduction of costs in battery manufacturing an essential step to encourage uptake. Also, for EVs to be more sustainable, changes to the battery manufacturing process are needed to reduce the amount of energy required.
The industry is now looking to move to new ‘dry’ processes which remove the need for the use of cathode drying ovens and reduce energy requirements for the electrode manufacturing step by up to 90 per cent.
Anaphite’s chemistry-based approach produces fully formulated Dry Coating Precursor powders (DCP) that enable the dry coating process. These powders are tailor-formulated to customer specifications enabling the best battery formulations to be made using dry processes. Anaphite’s technology is said to unlock the benefits of the dry coating process, which is claimed to reduce the cost of battery cell manufacturing by up to 40 per cent.
The project aims to demonstrate that Anaphite’s dry coated cathode matches the performance of energy and cost intensive wet coating. This project will enable Anaphite to scale its dry electrode production process to the next phase, demonstrating the performance that battery cell-makers need on industrially viable equipment, as well as build and consolidate relationships with global organisations specialising in dry coating technologies.
Joe Stevenson, Anaphite CEO, said: “Anaphite has built a very strong IP position and expert teams working in electrochemistry, process chemistry and chemical engineering. We are directing all these resources into enabling the step-change in battery manufacturing that is dry electrode coating. We’ve made this choice because of the double impact of reducing the energy needed to make EVs and of increasing the uptake of EVs by reducing their cost. Our customers are excited by the cathode performance improvements and ease of processing using Anaphite’s composite materials. We are now working alongside our customers to tailor our formulations for their dry coating processes.”
