TaiSan, the UK company pioneering quasi-solid state sodium batteries for the global automotive industry, announces an increase of £1.3 million today. This investment will accelerate the development of TaiSan’s game-changing battery electric vehicle (BEV) technology.
Led by EIT InnoEnergy and TSP Ventures and followed by Heartfelt VC and Exergon, TaiSan’s
pre-seed round is backed by Europe’s leading strategic e-mobility funds. Co-funded by the European Union, EIT InnoEnergy has investment links to both leading automotive OEMs and gigafactories. Heartfelt VC is also linked to a leading automotive OEM.
Adopting sodium-ion chemistry is widely regarded as one of the major BEV shifts. The game-changing technology offers significant cost, sustainability, and safety benefits compared to lithium-ion. The global market is expected to rapidly grow to a value of £1 billion by 2028, reaching a capacity of 186GWh/year in 2030. TaiSan has already signed 12 MoUs with automakers worldwide, with whom it will conduct collaborative R&D activities in the immediate years.
Launched in 2022 to realise an industry-disrupting increase in the energy density of sodium batteries for BEVs, TaiSan has developed its own proprietary, innovative polymer electrolyte featuring a metal anode, using sustainable and abundant, environmentally friendly materials across the board. This has resulted in a cell with comparable volumetric and gravimetric energy density to an automotive lithium-ion cell but with a projected 20 per cent cost saving over the most common chemistry for BEV batteries.
TaiSan’s ultra-advanced technology offers industry-standard ionic conductivity to enable fast charging and high mechanical strength to withstand dendrite growth with no possible leakage and risk of fire. With a projected 20 per cent cost saving vs lithium-ion, with comparable energy density and designed as a ‘drop-in’ solution to existing lithium-ion battery manufacturing facilities, TaiSan’s battery innovation is cost-effective and designed for mass production.
TaiSan has already signed 12 MOUs with automotive manufacturers, and its latest funding will help to advance the development of the company’s innovative electrolyte and anode materials. These patent-pending innovations are based not only on material science but also on scalable manufacturing methods.
Over the last two years, TaiSan has received close to a total of £500,000 in funding from multiple UK Government and Research organisations, including the Department for Transport (DfT), The Faraday Institution, Innovate UK, Advanced Propulsion Centre, Royal Academy of Engineering and Catapult Connected Places. In October 2023, TaiSan was recognised with the award of “Best Growth Potential” by Professor Sarah Sharples (Chief Scientific Advisor to DfT).
The TaiSan team comprises experienced battery scientists and electrochemists, formerly of MIT, Imperial College, Jaguar Land Rover, and The Faraday Institution organisations. Founder Sanzhar Taizhan has received multiple UK battery awards and is a former JLR battery engineer. He also became honouree of the Forbes Kazakhstan 30 under 30 after founding and leading two Warwick University project teams, which reached top places at Hyperloop contests run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX and The Boring Company.
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