The most widespread type of battery, lithium-ion, still costs around $140 per kilowatt-hour for a pack.
Instead, manufacturers have started to explore sodium-ion batteries, not as a replacement, but as a complement to lithium-ion.
To deliver that many batteries, Unigrid isn’t going to be building its own factories.
Small vehicles like these are popular in India and Southeast Asia, where the intense heat can make lithium-ion batteries prone to overheating.
To get its sodium-ion batteries into production, Unigrid has raised a $12 million Series A.
Wastewater from these plants emerges laden with sodium sulfate, a byproduct of sulfuric acid and caustic soda, two chemicals used in battery manufacturing, copper refining and other industries.
“We can totally create a circular economy around these reagent chemicals,” Bilen Akuzum, co-founder and CTO of Aepnus Technology, told TechCrunch.
The two founded Aepnus to modernize the century-old chloralkali process, which splits salts like sodium sulfate back into the acids and bases that created them.
“We don’t use any expensive catalysts in our electrolyzers,” Akuzum said.
For customers, fully recycling sodium sulfate waste should reduce disposal and material costs.
Coreshell, a battery materials startup, revealed a breakthrough this week that could lower the cost of lithium-ion batteries.
Forecasts for cheaper EVs are counting on a steady stream of technological improvements, including better battery materials.
Coreshell’s first product will be a silicon anode paired with a lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) cathode.
Coreshell predicts that its silicon anodes might even give LFP an edge over traditional NMC cells with graphite anodes.
Granted, their silicon anode materials will cost more, but they’ll have the benefit of scale and experience to help bring costs down.
The future of recycling is here, and of course, it involves robots and artificial intelligence.
Rebecca Hu, the co-founder of the robotics company Glacier, creates robots that help recycling plants separate and, well, recycle material.
Before, sorting recyclable materials was a manual job that took hours for someone to do.
Today, Glacier has been using AI cameras so that robots can better identify recyclable materials.
Hu said training the robots to spot materials was akin to teaching a toddler how to tell two things apart.
Saudi Arabia is poised to become one of the largest global construction hubs owing to its trillion-dollar infrastructure and the real estate projects that are underway in the country.
BRKZ is today emerging from stealth backed by a $8 million Series A round co-led by Beco Capital and 9900 Capital.
Aramco’s Wa’ed Ventures, Knollwood Investment Advisory, RZM Investment and MISY Ventures also participated in the round.
Following the fresh capital injection, the B2B marketplace aims to expand in Saudi Arabia and the MENA region to facilitate contractors in procuring materials and manufacturers in selling, with a focus on same or next-day delivery.
He added that the startup can process commonly ordered building materials within minutes, but more time is required for “specialized materials”.
Orbital Materials — founded by Jonathan Godwin, who previously was involved with DeepMind’s material research efforts — is creating an AI-powered platform that can be used to discover materials ranging from batteries to carbon dioxide-capturing cells.
Godwin says he was inspired to found Orbital Materials by seeing how the techniques underpinning AI systems like AlphaFold, DeepMind’s AI that can predict a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence, could be applied to the materials sciences.
“[Yet] demand for new advanced materials … is growing hugely as our economies become electrified and de-carbonized.”Orbital Materials isn’t the first to apply AI to materials R&D.
Osmium AI, led by an ex-Googler and backed by Y Combinator, enables industrial customers to predict the physical properties of new materials, then refine and optimize those new materials leveraging AI.
But what sets Orbital Materials apart is its proprietary AI model for materials science, Godwin claims.
Bulk Exchange, a startup building a marketplace that lets construction companies and contractors buy and dispose materials in bulk, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
If Bulk Exchange can get enough providers on to its platform, estimators may be able to execute their work more quickly.
Second, once contracts are signed, Bulk Exchange can convert estimates into sales by linking buyers and sellers on the platform.
Instead, Bulk Exchange intends to charge for its services similar to a SaaS model.
If Bulk Exchange can scale and collect lots of data, it could have a second business and revenue stream in time.
Unlike nearly every other lithium-ion battery chemistry, TAQ is an organic compound — not the free-range hippie type, but the kind made primarily of carbon.
Researchers have been investigating organic materials as cathodes, the negatively charged part of the cell, because they could store more energy at lower cost.
TAQ, short for bis-tetraaminobenzoquinone, is composed of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen arranged in a row of three neighboring hexagons.
The structure is similar to that of graphite, which is almost universally used today as an anode material (the positive terminal).
Lamborghini, which previously used a supercapacitor developed in Dincă’s lab in its Sian model, has licensed the patent on the material.
Honda is dunking on the ‘thick, heavy’ electric vehicle trend in an attempt to build buzz around its upcoming 0 series EVs.
Honda also didn’t say specify if it plans to use such materials when it commercially launches its first 0 series electric vehicles.
Honda has lagged in the switch to electrics, and it recently called it quits on a plan to co-develop “affordable” electric vehicles with GM.
Though Honda plans to launch an electric Prologue this year, the automaker intends to launch 30 EVs by 2030.
That’s why the 0 series launch will be a big moment for Honda.
Lingrove is taking on laminates — thin layers of wood and other materials — with a carbon-negative option that they claim performs better while looking as good.
Lingrove has developed a wood veneer alternative out of flax fiber and plant-based resins that’s carbon-negative yet results in a material they say is “very high stiffness, durable, and resistant,” i.e.
They call it “ekoa” — yes, in lowercase — and hope to make inroads in cars and other interior surfaces with a new $10 million funding round.
The Series B round was led by Lewis & Clark Agrifood and Diamond Edge Ventures, with participation from Bunge Ventures and SOSV.
You may wonder, as I did, why not use actual wood — things like sawdust and wood chips already coming out of industrial wood-handling processes?
