Noon Energy, a developer of carbon-oxygen batteries, raised $28 million in Series A financing to help commercialize its ultra-low-cost, high-energy density carbon-oxygen battery technology for long-duration energy storage.
The funding round was led by Clean Energy Ventures and Aramco Ventures’ new Sustainability Fund, with participation from Emerson Collective, At One Ventures, Mistletoe, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, TechEnergy Ventures, and others.
Noon claims that, unlike lithium-based technologies, their carbon-based battery, which does not store energy in metals, provides a significant advantage.
The Noon batteries store energy in carbon and oxygen using nature-based chemistry principles, eliminating the need for hard-to-mine metals, including lithium and cobalt. It requires only 1% of other critical elements compared to lithium-ion batteries.
“Our carbon battery stores energy by splitting CO2, similar to how nature stores energy by photosynthesis. Storage in the same air-abundant molecules that nature itself uses, rather than rare metals, is key to our fundamental advantages in cost, sustainability, and energy density,” said Noon Energy Founder and CEO Chris Graves.
In the past 14 months, the Noon team has achieved a 50x scaleup of the core technology and plans to bring the carbon-oxygen battery to market to customers in two years.
The company says the core components of its technology are already operating onboard NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover in its MOXIE device, which the company’s founder Chris Graves helped develop as part of the NASA team to extract oxygen from the CO2 on Mars.
“Noon Energy’s technology has far greater potential as modular, scalable, and low-cost long-duration energy storage than any other approach we’ve ever seen, and therefore can enable any system, from a single home to an entire grid, to run on 100 percent solar and wind,” said David Miller, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Clean Energy Ventures.
According to Mercom’s Annual And Q4 2022 Funding and M&A Report for Storage, Grid & Efficiency. VC funding for energy storage companies decreased by 34%, with $5.8 billion in 2022 compared to $8.8 billion in 2021.
