Offgrid Energy Labs raises $15M in Series A funding round
The company will use the funding to set up its pilot facility in the UK and to kick start production of the firm’s ZincGel technology cells.
Energy storage solutions startup Offgrid Energy Labs has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by listed specialty chemicals manufacturing company Archean Chemical Industries.
The round also saw participation from existing investor Ankur Capital.
According to the company’s co-founders Rishi Srivastava and Tejas Kusurkar, the major portion of the new funding will go into setting up its 10 megawatt hour (MWh) UK demo manufacturing facility, which will act as the test-bed for the company’s ZinGel technology equipped batteries, before it starts commercialisation.
After commercialisation, the company is looking to set up its first gigawatt facility in India.
Offgrid is developing ZincGel Technology, a cell chemistry that uses non-toxic and proven zinc-bromide chemistry, which is a better fit for stationary storage, and includes long-durable energy storage use cases such as in solar energy and wind energy. This technology is designed for full daily deep cycles and the cell chemistry thrives under 0-100% charge or discharge conditions, as is not the case with lithium cell batteries, Srivastava told YourStory in an interview.
“In cases when you need longer discharge cycles, 6 to 12 hours kind of duration, lithium is unfavorable because of commercial reasons today. Also, there is a slight risk on deploying lithium because of certain fire hazards. Since these projects are much larger scale, these risks become much more significant to account for. So, in terms of performance, safety and performance fits really, really well for longer duration batteries for our chemistry,” said Kusurkar.
Additionally, cell chemistry also reduces the supply chain constraints plaguing lithium where four countries—Australia, Chile, China, and Argentina constitute about 90% of the global lithium supply. Zinc is also one of the most abundant metals in the earth’s crust and is widely available and produced in over 50 countries, including India.
Though the company is testing and demo-ing its cells in its UK facility, the company is highly focused on India as a market. However, it has seen rising interest from Europe and from firms in the US.
“We are looking at a global market, but we will start with India. We are a deep science and tech company that has come out of India. Therefore, obviously, India is very close to our hearts and is a big market,” Srivastava said.
Founded in 2018 by Kusurkar, Srivastava, Brindan Tulachan, and Ankur Agarwal at SIIC-IIT Kanpur, Offgrid Energy Labs focuses on delivering commercially viable and sustainable stationary energy storage solutions for three key applications: peak shifting, net-zero industrial electricity, and decentralised off-the-grid energy solutions.
The deeptech company had previously raised a seed round led by Shell Ventures—the investment arm of British oil and gas company Shell.
Edited by Megha Reddy