Anthro Energy, an advanced battery technology company, announced the closing of an oversubscribed $7.2 million seed funding round.
Union Square Ventures and Energy Revolution Ventures co-led the round, with participation from Voyager Ventures, Emerson Collective, Nor’Easter Ventures, Ultratech Capital Partners, and the Stanford President’s Venture Fund.
The funding will be used to accelerate the commercialization of Anthro’s core battery technology platform for applications ranging from wearables to mobility.
With Lithium-ion batteries leading the energy storage revolution, Anthro has developed a novel polymer engineering platform to enable structural batteries. These flexible batteries can be integrated into ‘dead space’ of devices such as straps, bands, and substrates to create 2-5 fold improvements in run time and functionality.
“Our materials can impart safety and structural integrity to batteries of any chemistry, for any application. Safety and mechanical stability are core challenges facing the next generation of high-performance batteries, and we have a solution for that,” said Anthro’s CTO and co-founder Dr. Joe Papp.
The company currently provides prototypes to several partners developing a wide range of wearable products.
“Anthro’s highly tunable electrolyte technology enables high conductivity, strength, safety, and stability in next-generation batteries.” said Peter Robson, managing director of Energy Revolution Ventures, a UK-based venture capital firm focused on funding electrochemistry technologies. “We are excited by their approach that uses a scalable engineering process to solve the challenges of both today’s and tomorrow’s lithium-ion batteries.”
Anthro spun out of Stanford University in 2021 and is currently located in San Jose, California. The company is also supported by Activate.org, National Security Innovation Capital, a U.S. Department of Energy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant, and a U.S. Army XTech SBIR award.
According to Mercom’s 9M And Q3 2022 Funding and M&A Report for Storage, Grid & Efficiency. VC funding in Energy Storage in 9M 2022 fell by over 44%, with $4 billion in 73 deals compared to $7.2 billion in 60 deals in 9M 2021.
Earlier this month, Form Energy, an iron-air-based battery systems provider, announced that it has raised $450 million in a Series E financing round which was led by TPG’s global impact investing platform, TPG Rise, with additional participation from GIC and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
