Pre-seed funding round raises £1.3m for UK battery innovator

London-based TaiSan’s pre-seed funding round was led by EIT InnoEnergy and TSP Ventures and followed by Heartfelt VC and Exergon.

The company said that adoption of sodium-ion chemistry is widely regarded as one of the next major BEV shifts, offering cost, sustainability, and safety benefits compared to lithium-ion. The global market is expected to be worth £1bn by 2028, reaching a capacity of 186GWh/year in 2030. 

In a statement, Lowina Lundström, CEO of EIT InnoEnergy Scandinavia, said: "Until now, we have mainly seen [sodium-ion] as an option for stationary storage applications. However, when we discovered TaiSan we immediately saw the potential for sodium-ion to move into new more demanding applications such as traction batteries or high-power batteries.” 

Launched in 2022, TaiSan has developed proprietary electrolyte and anode materials. The company’s Gen 1.0 product is said to have resulted in comparable volumetric and gravimetric battery energy density to an automotive lithium-ion equivalent, but with a projected 20 per cent cost saving over the most common chemistry for BEV batteries. Furthermore, TaiSan said its technology is based on sustainable and abundant, environmentally friendly materials, with no use of lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper metals.