Inlyte Energy, a developer of batteries for grid-scale energy storage, secured $8 million in seed funding to develop the first generation of its grid batteries made with iron and table salt.
The funding round was by At One Ventures with participation from First Spark Ventures, Valo Ventures, TechEnergy Ventures, Climate Capital, Anglo American, and others.
The company claims that its batteries will have the lowest cost once manufacturing is scaled; iron and salt are also locally produced in almost all parts of the world and avoid external supply chains. The iron and salt battery has a very long lifetime, with a completely selective solid ceramic membrane and no flammable organic compounds, while providing the same round-trip efficiency and a similar footprint as lithium-ion, according to Inlyte.
“Conventional sodium metal halide batteries, made from nickel and salt, were developed for electric vehicles in the 1980s and ’90s but never made it down the cost curve,” says Founder & CEO, Dr. Antonio Baclig. “At Stanford, I realized that by optimizing that design for the grid instead of for vehicles, and by using iron instead of nickel, we could drive the cost incredibly low. Inexpensive storage is what will truly make wind and solar a competitive total solution versus fossil fuels, not just in California but everywhere in the world.”
According to Mercom’s 9M And Q3 2023 Funding and M&A Report for Storage & Smart Grid, VC funding in Energy Storage in 9M 2023 was up by 115% YoY with $8.6 billion in 68 deals compared to $4 billion in 74 deals in 9M 2022.
Earlier this year, XL Batteries, a provider of long-duration grid-scale energy storage solutions, raised $10 million in a Seed-2 round, which Catalus Capital led, with additional investment from SIP Global, Xerox Ventures, and existing investors Jeffrey Schwarz, Joel Greenblatt, and Robert Goldstein.
