Start-up Moonwatt has secured €8 million ($8.6 million) in funding to develop its sodium-ion battery system for use in renewable-energy applications.
The Netherland’s firm has said its sodium-ion energy storage system technology will be developed for use alongside solar power-plant applications.
Moonwatt was launched last September by CCO Valentin Rota, CEO Zukui Hu and CTO Guillaume Mancini – all of whom were involved with energy storage system technologies while working at both Tesla and Freyr.
The Amsterdam-headquartered company is now assembling a team with energy storage expertise.
The funding round was co-led by venture capitalists Daphni (France) and LEA Partners (Germany). Additional backing was given by French firms: Founders Future, AFI Ventures (the seed & pre-seed fund managed by French firm Ventech) and Kima Ventures (an angel investor founded by billionaire Xavier Niel).
Sodium-ion technology
There is little information on Moonwatt’s website about the technology it is developing, however the company’s ambition is to make its ESS’s scalable and easily deployable.
While the materials for sodium-based technology is cheap the technology lacks the energy density of its competitors, such as lithium-ion.
When BEST spoke with Venkat Srinivasan consortium director of LENS (Low-cost Earth-abundant Na-ion Storage) last month, he told us that sodium-based battery research and development projects must focus on understanding how far the technology can be pushed.
Read the full story here.
Similarly, earlier this year BEST reported how a Stanford University paper, published in Nature Energy, had found widespread adoption of sodium-ion batteries could be limited without greater breakthroughs in the technology. Read more here.
