Moonwatt raises €8m for sodium battery storage
Dutch startup Moonwatt has raised €8m for the industry’s first dedicated sodium battery energy storage system for solar farms.
The seed funding was co-led by daphni and LEA Partners, Founders Future, AFI Ventures (by Ventech) and Kima Ventures also participated alongside strategic business angels and customers.
The funding will be used to accelerate the development and deployment of Moonwatt’s hardware and software technology and expand the team. Co-founders CEO Zukui Hu, CTO Guillaume Mancini, and CCO Valentin Rota met while working at Tesla Energy.
Low cost, safe battery power would allow solar farms to store energy to supply during the night. Sodium is a low cost alternative to lithium ion and lithium iron phosphate battery backup systems but has struggled to scale up. This can also spread the power requirements throughout the day and night which can minimise the need for upgrading the power grid.
The world’s largest battery maker CATL launched sodium cells in production in 2021 while Natron in the US is developing a $1.4bn gigafactory to make sodium ion battery cells.
Moonwatt says is using a new sodium-ion battery chemistry and an innovative energy storage product design optimised for solar farms..
“We started our product design from a blank sheet of paper, freeing ourselves from legacy features inherited from other segments of the battery industry, with the goal of designing a system from scratch that is fundamentally cheaper, safer and more reliable,” said Zukui Hu, CEO and Co-Founder of Moonwatt. “Our vision is a product that can be deployed anywhere, and that can be scaled up multiple orders of magnitude without facing raw materials scarcity,”
“Renewable power growth has exceeded all expectations, but we’re approaching a tipping point where it won’t be able to scale further without better energy storage. Created by industry veterans, Moonwatt is solving this with a differentiated storage product built specifically for solar – this is the breakthrough the industry has been missing,” said Paul Bazin, Partner at daphni.
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