The company has developed technology, using graphene, that it claims can cut lithium-ion battery charging times in half and reduces manufacturing costs by 12%.
The round was led by Elbow Beach Capital, and with participation from Silicon Roundabout Ventures, Wealth Club, Blue Wire Capital, OION, Zero Carbon Capital and Deeptech Labs. Cofounders Alex Hewitt and Sam Burrow started the company in 2018 while they were students at Bristol University.
“30% of an EV’s costs come from its battery,” said Hewitt, “and 50% of the battery’s costs come from its cathode. So roughly 15% of an EV’s cost is the cathode, but in 2021, only 6% of capital raised by private companies went into cathode development.”
The cathode is one of the key components of a lithium-ion battery and it’s the flow of ions and electrons between the positively charged cathode and another part of the battery, the anode, is what creates energy.
According to Hewitt boosting cathode efficiency — both in terms of finances and charge times — is a key part of hastening the green transition.
Anaphite’s process works by incorporating graphene into the cathode. Graphene, which has strong electric properties, comes in either a specialist form which is highly expensive or a low-cost form that’s difficult to process and work into the battery system.
Anaphite has developed a technology that enables the incorporation of the low-cost graphene into the cathodes, something that was previously hard to achieve.
“The graphene-enhanced cathode material enables higher charge rates due to the high connectivity of the graphene,” Hewitt explained. It also increases the energy density in the battery.
The second part of Anaphite’s technology is a coating process which removes the need for large coating ovens currently used in the cell manufacturing process. Electrodes inside lithium-ion batteries are coated with a chemical mixture that is key to make the battery work. However, they tend to use a lot of energy and take up a large portion of factory space. Replacing them leads to a cost reduction of up to 16%.
Anaphite is currently in trials with a European EV battery manufacturer, which is testing its materials in their batteries — and it’s hoping to be in commercial EV production lines by 2028.
