News

Nano-Carbon Energy Storage and Materials Get $5 Million Investment

September 24, 2018 by Paul Shepard

Nanoramic Laboratories has closed a $5 million investment round, contributing to a $100 million week in funding announcements for the Boston tech community. The round includes strategic investments by NGK Spark Plug Co., Ltd. and Marubun Corporation, both based in Japan.  Each company contributed $2 million to the round, with the remainder of the round reserved for investments by current shareholders.

The funds will be used for product qualification and scale up of Nanoramic’s next breakthrough products including a suite of new advanced material products such as thermal interface materials, composite electrodes, EMI/RFI shielding materials, and the revolutionary reflowable Chip Ultracapacitor.

“These investments from NGK Spark Plug, and Marubun not only allow Nanoramic to continue leading innovation,” shared Nanoramic CEO, Eric Kish, “but they unlock our ability to provide the Asian electronics market with best-in-industry ultracapacitors and advanced materials.”

Nanoramic’s advanced materials solutions provide higher thermal conductivity than any other thermal interface materials on the market while retaining or improving advantageous mechanical properties.  The global market size of thermal interface materials is expected to exceed $2.33 billion by 2021.

Additionally, Nanoramic’s energy storage technology is well-suited for applications such as power loss protection for solid state drives, power buffering for lithium-ion batteries, and auxiliary power supplies for peak and pulsed power, wireless sensors, and energy harvesting.

“I am very pleased with this strategic partnership with Nanoramic Laboratories.” said Teppei Okawa, Executive Vice President of NGK Spark Plug. “This, combined with a shared vision of the importance of innovative energy storage solutions, is an exciting opportunity for both companies. This alliance enables us to accelerate our other batteries projects, and is an early achievement for our newly-established USA Innovation Center.”

Marubun Corporation is one of the largest electronics components and materials distributors in Japan with a global presence, serving the automotive and consumer electronics industries, which is expected to exceed $2.9 trillion in market share by 2020.

“Marubun Corporation looks forward to creating value for our customers by providing new solutions based on Nanoramic's world class nanomaterials technology. Beginning with Nanoramic's first ever reflowable ultracapacitor and expanding to areas including energy storage, thermal management and high-performance materials, we will deliver new products that will allow our customers to overcome the toughest engineering challenges in new and exciting ways,” said Satoshi Fujino, Senior Vice President at Marubun Corporation.

“The cutting edge technology using thermal interface material will solve most of the heat problems related to SOC, and the disruptive innovation of reflowable ultracapacitors will contribute to the evolution of next generation technology in various applications. We believe those revolutionary and innovative technologies will change the game in those markets!” exclaimed Fujino.