Crown family part of $65 million investment in battery startup
Battery-technology startup NanoGraf has raised $65 million to ramp up production at a West Side factory that will open later this year.
Warrenville-based Volta Energy Technologies and CC Industries, the Crown family's holding company, led the investment. TechNexus and five other investors also joined the round, with existing backers, including Hyde Park Angels and Evergreen Climate Innovations.
NanoGraf, which spun out of Northwestern University 11 years ago, is in the final stages of proving out technology that increases the capacity of standard rechargeable lithium-ion batteries by about 20%.
The company recently won a $10 million contract to supply batteries to the U.S. Department of Defense.
It's a noteworthy milestone for Chicago to watch an idea in a university lab evolve into an advanced-manufacturing company. NanoGraf hasn't crossed the finish line yet, but it's close. Under a pilot program, several military suppliers are expected to receive individual cells made by NanoGraf and turn them into battery packs that can be used to power everything from radios to night-vision goggles. Once the suppliers determine whether the finished battery packs meet specifications, production will ramp up.
The company raised money at a time when venture-capital deals have become more difficult to complete. NanoGraf is in better position than most, benefitting from increased focus on climate change and battery technology as automakers shift toward electric vehicles, as well as increased focus by the federal government in stimulating more advanced manufacturing domestically.
NanoGraf raised $10 million more than it originally had sought in what became an oversubscribed fundraising round, says CEO Francis Wang. "It's still not easy. We had to knock on a lot of doors."
Wang says the new funding should last two to three years and get the company to market, supplying the defense industry as well as medical and consumer electronics. "We've sent thousands of (battery) cells for validation," he says. "What's next is pack validation, then mass production."
NanoGraf came up with a different approach to making anodes, the part of a battery that holds a charge. Most anodes are made of graphite. NanoGraf added silicon, which improves the battery's capacity to hold a charge.
The company claims the lithium-ion batteries made using its components have the highest energy density achieved so far. It also overcame several key technical challenges related to using silicon.
NanoGraf produces the anode material but uses a contract-manufacturing partner to assemble the final batteries. NanoGraf has been making products in small quantities in Japan since 2018. Now it's moving production back to the U.S.
Its West Side factory will have about 30 employees when production starts in the third quarter. The company plans to triple its output to about 35 tons of anode material this year, or enough to make about 15 million standard rechargeable battery cells that are about the size of a AA battery.
