ActaCell has received a promise of $1 million from the state of Texas to boost its development of longer-life lithium-ion batteries.
To be specific, the Austin, Texas-based startup said Tuesday that it had secured $250,000 in pre-seed funding from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.
The remaining $750,000 awaits further proof that the company's technology, licensed from the University of Texas at Austin, is ready to be scaled up into commercial production, CEO Bill Ott said Tuesday. The company expects to deliver that by mid-year, he said.
ActaCell, founded in 2007, already raised $5.8 million last summer from investors Google.org, DFJ Mercury, Applied Ventures and Good Energies (see Funding Roundup: VCs Bet on Electric Rides).
Its goal is to deliver a longer-lasting lithium-manganese battery – the chemistry favored by such automakers as Nissan and General Motors for their plug-in hybrid and electric vehicle applications because of its ability to withstand higher operating temperatures (see In Batteries, Will Tesla Stand Alone With Cobalt?)
Without getting too specific, Ott said that ActaCell was "working to harden the material in the cell" so that it could be discharged and recharged more often, increasing what's known as its cycle life – a key consideration for batteries that are supposed to last for years.
The new round of funding will help the company hire new managerial and technical staff, with a goal of bringing full-time employees from five today to about 12 by mid-2010, Ott said. At the same time, the company would continue to make demonstration battery packs using its chemistry with an eye toward proving their commercial promise, he said.
Just when ActaCell might start mass-producing, Ott couldn't say. The company had been a partner in the so-called National Alliance for Advanced Transportation Batteries, which did not receive the up to $1 billion in stimulus funding it had sought from the Department of Energy to build a U.S. battery plant (see Green Light post).
Absent that funding, "We clearly need a manufacturing partner," he said, though he didn't name any such potential partners.
