Blue Spark Technologies has secured $1.5 million of a planned $5 million series B round to bring its line of printed carbon-zinc batteries for passive RFID tags to commercial production by the end of the year, the company reported Monday.
The Cleveland-based company is one of several developing tiny batteries for use in things like wireless sensors. RFID (radio frequency identification) tags and those greeting cards that sing a song when you open them.
The idea is a battery cheap enough to mass manufacture but robust enough to last the lifetime of the device they're being put in, to avoid the costs of replacing them.
Blue Spark takes an old battery chemistry – carbon-zinc – and adds the new twist of printing the batteries on a roll of plastic or other substrate. Monday's funding came from existing investors Early Stage Partners and SunBridge Partners, as well as some private investors. Blue Spark had secured $1.5 million and was working with other investors to close the remaining $3.5 million, it said.
Blue Spark was founded in 2002 with technology from Eveready Battery Co., the maker of Energizer batteries, and raised $6.2 million from SunBridge in a 2007 series A round under its previous name, Thin Battery Technology.
Blue Spark's new funding round is meant to bring to full-scale production a 1.5-volt line of batteries to go into passive RFID devices from Swiss company EM Microelectronic, the company said.
Passive RFID devices take power from the radio signals they receive to do their work. Adding Blue Spark's batteries to those devices can boost their performance while keeping them much less expensive than active RFID devices, which contain their own power source, Blue Spark CEO Gary Johnson claimed in a news release.
Other makers of tiny batteries are using different technologies that can offer recharging as an option.
Littleton, Colo.-based Infinite Power Solutions, for example, has raised about $50 million to develop solid-state micro energy cell devices about the size of a postage stamp, and has customers including Lockheed Martin. Planar Energy Devices and Cymbet Corp. have customers for their lithium-ion based thin-film battery technologies (see Tiny Batteries Get Better).
Some of these tiny batteries are meant to be rechargeable, which could allow them to be linked with energy harvesting devices that capture energy from radio waves, vibrations or heat to keep running for years or decades without replacement (see A Battery for Perpetual Motion).
