Green Li-ion says its battery recycling machines are the โsize of a small house,โ so itโs no wonder the Singapore-based startup needed to top up on funds. Itโd only raised about $15 million ahead of its latest cash infusion.
This week, Green Li-ion announced a $20.5 million โpre-Series Bโ round led by climate-tech investor TRIREC. The startup said other investors, including SOSV and Equinor Ventures (the VC arm of the Norway-owned fossil fuel giant), also chipped in.
The deal boosts Green Li-ionโs post-money valuation to $187 million after just three years, chief executive Leon Farrant told TechCrunch. The startupโs logo is (you guessed it!) a green lion.
The new cash will help the startup scale production of its recycling tech, which the firm says can process โ100% of all used lithium batteriesโ and pop out precursor cathode active material thatโll eventually go into fresh lithium-ion batteries.
Lithium is in high demand and mining the metal wreaks havoc on the environment, making recycling tech a crucial tool in lowering the footprint of things like electric cars and storage for renewable energy.
Image Credits: Green Li-ion
Green Li-ion doesnโt recycle batteries itself; it licenses its tech to battery makers and recyclers, including Aleon and TES (which is owned by SK, the South Korea-based fossil fuel giant). Green Li-ion aims to crank out 50 recycling units per year via two factories โ one in Houston, Texas and another in Singapore.
As for that โpre-Series B,โ Farrant said the startup has split its Series B into two parts, which encompasses the raise announced this week and another in about nine months. โDue to our relatively low levels of fund raising to date,โ the founder added, the startup โneeded to draw a line in the sand and establish a valuation increase for the larger portion of the raise.โ
Rawr? Green Li-ion recharges with $20.5M to scale its recycling tech by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch
As pressure grows on companies to reduce reliance on gas and oil, established processes even at industrial scales are being questioned, offering an opportunity for tech to step in. SepPure is looking to replace the complex gas-based distillation of oils with a membrane engineered at the nanometer scale, and its approach has attracted $12 million in a new funding round.
Oils of all kinds must be extracted and purified from their source, which might be a seed, fiber, or some other organic material. Of course, you can crush an olive and get a lot of the oil out of it, but nowhere near all of it; to do that, the pulp is immersed in a massive amount of solvent, like acetone or hexane, which pulls out the remaining oil. The resulting mixture is then heated, usually via natural gas or oil, and the solvent and oil separate.
This fuel-intensive process has persisted for decades, partly because the high temperatures required preclude the use of solar or wind as the heat source.
A potential alternative appeared in the water-purification space many years ago, which for a long time also used a distillation process to separate H2O from contaminants. Membranes can be engineered to allow through certain substances while others are blocked, letting, for instance, water molecules but not large organic ones. This approach has been taking over the water industry, because itโs cheaper, simpler, and uses less energy (look for โreverse osmosisโ on the label).
SepPure founder and CEO Mohammad Farahani explained that the pressures of climate change and gas prices (not to mention cost savings) have caused others to look at membranes as a possibility. DiviGas, for example, created a membrane that separates hydrogen from carbon dioxide, and Membrion made one to remove heavy metals from water. But water isnโt a particularly harsh substance, unlike many chemical precursors to useful oils and other molecules.
โIt took a long time to get a good solution for water, and basically every company making membranes focused on water,โ said Farahani. โMaybe only 10 years ago, people started to research chemical-resistant membranes. We think weโre at the same place as when water membranes were introduced 40 years ago โ basically itโll start to be implemented everywhere.โ
A computer displays a cross-section of SepPure nanofilter tubes. Image Credits: SepPure
SepPure makes whatโs called a hollow-fiber nanofilter, which is exactly what it sounds like: a hollow polymer fiber with a surface engineered at the nanometer scale to allow only certain molecules through. Pack a bunch of them together and stick them in a tube, and push liquid through the tube to filter it. Though the membrane doesnโt separate 100% of the two substances, it vastly reduces the scale of the distillation step. The concept isnโt new, and in fact is used across the membrane industry, but where SepPure diverges is in its durability and compactness.
โStrong solvents can easily dissolve polymers โ you have to make polymeric membranes using solvents, but then they need to withstand solvents. Thatโs a challenging thing and a lot of research was done to get there,โ said Farahani. โThe beauty of what weโve done is creating fibers to withstand harsh chemicals, high temperature, and high pressure.โ
Water and gas arenโt so demanding in those categories, so theyโve received the bulk of the attention, but now a version exists that can split off oils from solvents, or other valuable molecules from a similarly difficult mixture. That has applications in any industry that still uses distillation due to the fragility of old membrane processes โ and there are a lot. Separation processes make up a meaningful proportion of global energy use and emissions.
SepPure has a competitor in Germanyโs Evonik, which creates a similar product. But Farahani said that while this earlier version of the technique is fine for high-margin products like in the pharmaceutical industry, itโs too slow and bulky to use in high-volume, low-margin processes like food oil production.
In the lab, hollow-fiber nanotubing is created, and a small version of the final filter is shown. Image Credits: SepPure
Filters tend to come in a standard size: a pipe 4 inches in diameter and 40 inches in length. SepPure claims it can put five times as much membrane in that space, improving efficiency and reducing cost: push five times as much stuff through the same number of pipes, or filter the same amount in far less space. And thatโs without reckoning for increased pressure and other combinatorial factors.
Overall, through these gains and the reduction of fuel-based heating, Farahani estimates they could reduce the cost of producing (for example) 100,000 tons of oil in a year from around $7.5 million to about $2.5 million. And apparently the filter fibers, once exhausted after a couple years of use, can be reused to create flame-retardant fabrics.
The $12 million Series A round was led by SOSV, with participation from Anji Microelectronics, Real Tech Fund, Seeds Capital, EPS Ventures, and others. The company previously raised $2.5 million in 2019.
The money will be used to complete construction of its first filter production facility, in Singapore.
โAs soon as we begin implementing our technology solutions at customer sites, we will quickly reach maximum capacity. In anticipation of growing demand for our modules, our team is already working on expansion plans,โ said Farahani.
SepPureโs nanofilters massively reduce energy cost of industrial separation processes by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch