US battery company Noon Energy said it raised $28 million in Series A financing to commercialise its ultra-low-cost, high energy density carbon-oxygen battery technology for long-duration energy storage.
The round was led by Clean Energy Ventures and Aramco Ventures’ new Sustainability Fund, with participation from Emerson Collective, At One Ventures, Mistletoe, Doral Energy-Tech Ventures, and others. It said the funding will enable Noon Energy to grow its engineering, product and business development teams and to accelerate the path to market through critical demonstrations and field deployments.
Noon Energy has developed a carbon-based battery that does not store energy in metals, which it claims has a significant advantage over other battery technologies.
It stores energy in carbon and oxygen using nature-based chemistry principles. This eliminates the need for hard-to-mine metals including lithium and cobalt, and it requires only 1% of other critical elements compared to lithium-ion batteries, it said.
It claims to deliver more than 100 hours of capacity with the highest energy density among storage technologies today – at one-tenth the cost of lithium-ion batteries for long-duration storage.
In the past 14 months, the Noon team has achieved a 50x scale-up of the core technology and plans to bring the world’s first carbon-oxygen battery to market to customers in two years.
It said core components of the technology are already operating onboard NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover in its MOXIE device.