As Milwaukee-based nanomaterials startup
COnovate aspires to ramp up production of its advanced composite material for lithium-ion battery anodes, called eCOPHITE, the company is in a state of limbo due to a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, which is currently under review.
eCOPHITE charges over six times faster than graphite anodes, which make up 95% of the lithium-ion battery market. The eCOPHITE composite also stores twice the amount of energy per charge. The material, which has been classified as critical to electrification efforts, was discovered by
Dr. Carol Hirschmugl and
Marija Gajdardziska, both University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors, in 2016. Hirschmugl now leads the business.
COnovate was recently awarded a $1 million grant through the DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, aimed at helping COnovate ramp up production of eCOPHITE.
The plan had been to use that $1 million grant to partner with a co-manufacturer in South Carolina to produce the large quantity of material needed to provide proof of concept. COnovate would validate the use of its composite material by first introducing it to the power tool industry.
“With power tools, it's a much shorter time to validation,” said Hirschmugl. "That's a good entry way to demonstrate that your material is working. The battery manufacturers get to know what your material is. The amounts of material needed for things like EVs are so big, they need to kind of see smaller stuff happening first.”
COnovate would need to produce more than 30 tons of its composite material daily to secure a contract with a large battery manufacturer, Hirschmugl said.
Right now, the startup can make enough material to fill about four bags of flour daily, approximately 10 kilograms.
The DOE grant was meant to work in tandem with another $1 million being raised through the startup’s pre-seed round. If the DOE grant were not under review, Hirschmugl said COnovate would be ramping up production as soon as April.
"We have to regroup and figure out what our pathway forward is, given that we don't know the certainty of the DOE grant," she said.
For now, a $500,000 phase two SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) grant is helping the startup continue building momentum. COnovate was also selected last December to participate in Shell’s New Energy Challenge, a program that helps energy-focused startups scale their business.
While the DoE grant is under review, Hirschmugl is appealing to Wisconsin’s politicians to remind them of the growing need for eCOPHITE.
"China produces over 95% of battery-grade graphite,” said Hirschmugl. “Our approach is to make a domestically sourced material to partially or fully replace that graphite, so that we can reduce the supply chain risk for our battery manufacturers.”
Since its inception, COnovate has grown to a team of seven people. The startup has raised more than $5 million in federal and state grants, and $2.5 million in investment funding.
