Planar Energy Devices Secures $4-Million Venture Funding To Develop Thin-Film Li-Ion Batteries
Power-storage start-up Planar Energy Devices (Planar), a spinout of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has secured $4 million in a Series A venture-financing commitment from Battelle Ventures and its affiliate fund, Innovation Valley Partners (IVP).
Planar "is developing the next generation of thin-film lithium battery technologies by bringing together innovative and scalable technologies from a variety of research organizations," explained founder and company CEO Scott Faris, who noted that Planar had received $1.3 million, with another $2.7 million committed, "based on milestones to be achieved." He continued, "While there is a lot of experimentation with new exotic energy-storage materials, the company’s investors and I believe that lithium has significantly more potential than today’s batteries utilize and can be to power storage what silicon is to semiconductors."
"Thin-film batteries are projected to grow into a multi-billion-dollar component of the overall $55-billion energy-storage market, driven by wireless communications and such applications as smart cards, RFID and sensors," said Battelle Ventures General Partner Kef Kasdin. "We believe that Planar has great opportunity for success in these target markets, as well as in opening entirely new market applications for energy-storage solutions."
Noting that the $220-million fund’s sole limited partner, Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), manages or co-manages facilities of the U.S. Departments of Energy and Homeland Security, she said that the way this investment developed is "an excellent example of how we can leverage our unique position and act as ’founder capitalists,’ building companies from the ground up." Kasdin explained that she had become aware of a differentiated power-storage technology created at NREL and that Battelle Ventures and IVP had funded a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement that validated it and financed prototype development.
She said that she hired Faris, who had been CEO of Waveguide Solutions, a developer of planar lightwave circuit and microsystem products that was a spinout of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and COO of Ocean Optics, a precision-optical-component and fiber-optic-instrument spinout of the University of South Florida, to help develop the business plan for an NREL spinout to commercialize the technology and manufacture thin-film batteries.
