Italian climate startup Energy Dome, which has developed a “CO₂ Battery” for storing renewable energy, has closed a €40 million (~$44M) Series B round — bringing the total raised for its novel energy storage solution to €54M (or just shy of $60M).

The round was co-led by Eni Next, the corporate VC arm of Italian energy giant Eni; along with Neva SGR, the VC company owned by European banking group Intesa Sanpaolo. Existing investors also participated, including Barclays’ Sustainable Impact Capital, CDP Venture Capital, Invitalia, Novum Capital Partners and 360 Capital. Other investors in the round include Japan Energy Fund and Elemental Excelerator.

We last covered the 2020-founded startup when it closed an $11M Series A back in 2021 — explaining that its system uses CO₂ in a closed-loop cycle to store energy generated from renewable sources (such as solar).

Storage is important for renewables as major clean sources of energy generation like solar and wind power are variable, since the sun doesn’t always shine nor the wind always blow. This means, not that renewables are useless (as some right-wing politicians have tried to claim) but that decarbonizing the electricity grid using these alternative (green) sources of power requires innovation in storage tech — which is where Energy Dome is aiming to step in with its CO₂ Battery.

Its system works by changing the chemical compound, CO₂, from gas to liquid and back to gas (via compression and/or evaporation) in order to generate heat — which is either stored or used to drive a generator depending on whether the system is in charging or discharging mode.

The startup is named for an inflatable atmospheric gas holder filled with CO₂ (when in its gaseous form) which forms a core component of the storage system. Other key ‘ingredients’ for its battery are steel and water and Energy Dome touts the robustness of the system as a major differentiator vs alternative storage solutions, claiming no degradation over 30 years of operation.

It also claims the CO₂ Battery can store renewable energy with “75% RTE (AC-AC, MV-MV)” — meaning that for each unit of renewable energy stored the system is able to return 75% for later usage — doing so at a cost that it says is half the price of lithium batteries. (And mining for lithium raises environmental concerns in and of itself.)

Back in 2021 the startup was aiming to use the Series A funds to commercialize the tech. It’s made some progress on this front — saying it’s working with “several” utilities, independent power producers and corporate customers in key markets at this stage, per a press release, touting what it describes as “a qualified pipeline that exceeds 9GWh” in markets such as the U.S., Europe, South America, India and Australia.

The Series B funds will be used to enter what Energy Dome dubs “full commercial scaling mode on a global basis” — although it says it’s focusing on a set of key markets, with the US being principal among them (with an eye on tax incentives for green energy). 

“Our CO₂ Battery is ready for the market and, after closing the Series B round, we are ready to guarantee its performance to any customer that is real about getting rid of fossil fuels and substituting with dispatchable renewable energies,” noted founder and CEO Claudio Spadacini in a statement.

The startup added that it expects to have two standard 20MW-200MWh frames commercially operational by the end of 2024 — noting that the first unit already in the process of being manufactured.

Its focus now is on keeping up early momentum, having gone from starting operations to commercial-scale deployment in just three years, it also said. 

https://jac.yahoosandbox.com/1.7.2/safeframe.html

“The use of proceeds of the round will serve to provide financial guarantees to customers as a demonstration that this team is ready to put their ‘skin in the game’ alongside their customers in deploying the CO₂ Battery,” it added. “The investment will also support Energy Dome’s business expansion in the U.S. in order to leverage at maximum from the opportunities deriving from the Inflation Reduction Act and the associated Investment Tax Credits available for utility-scale energy storage.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/27/energy-dome-series-b/

February 16, 2023 07:00 AM Eastern Standard Time

TORONTO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Xaba, developers of the first AI-driven robotics and CNC machine controller, today announced it has closed a round of seed funding to bring to market AI-driven fabrication processes and intelligent autonomous machines. The funding round was led by Hazelview Ventures with participation from Whiteshell Group Inc. The investment will be used to accelerate the development of two Xaba manufacturing platforms, launch pilot programs, and grow the team across sales, deployment, and customer support.

“For the first time, robots used in manufacturing will be able to consider all elements of execution in the process, which will ultimately reduce reliance on human supervision.”

The robotics market is changing rapidly and driving significant market interest in the adoption of intelligent, autonomous robotics systems and innovative new materials for use in manufacturing, transportation, and construction. In addition, companies are increasingly demanding intelligent robotic systems that are more accurate than those in use today and which can easily be applied to existing manufacturing operations. Xaba has taken an innovative approach to transform robots used in manufacturing today into fully intelligent, self-directed systems that can automatically optimize, adjust, or change the design flow to incorporate the various constraints typically found within mechanization.

“Xaba lowers the barriers to adopting new manufacturing technologies, materials, and approaches,” said Massimiliano Moruzzi, CEO of Xaba. “For the first time, robots used in manufacturing will be able to consider all elements of execution in the process, which will ultimately reduce reliance on human supervision.”

Xaba has two manufacturing platforms – xCognition and xTrude – which use proprietary, state of the art industrial artificial intelligence (AI) to provide consistency, robustness, persistently high execution quality, and autonomy. Its platforms eliminate the need for constant human supervision, reprogramming, and waste – factors that significantly impact the return on investment of any major manufacturing or construction process.

Xaba has partnered with leaders in the aerospace and automotive industries on disruptive projects in the U.S., Canada, and Europe to validate these manufacturing platforms with users. For Project Arrow, the all-Canadian electric vehicle, Xaba produced the world’s first 3D-printed chassis. This technology is also being used in the development of a flying car.

xCognition is Xaba’s AI-driven control system. This true industrial robotics digital twin captures and models the physics of industrial robotics systems (elastic, dynamic, mechanical, tooling), and enables any robotics system to execute tasks such as drilling, welding, assembling, riveting, laser, data acquisition, and more with maximum accuracy, repeatability, and minimum programming and human supervision.

xTrude is Xaba’s AI-driven control system for Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) processes, enabling the successful 3D printing of large functional parts while dramatically reducing failures such as de-lamination, collapse, and distortion. xTrude uses a machine learning model paired with a process control user interface to model the physics of an FDM process. It automatically computes optimum values for dominant process parameters such as flowrate, feedrate, extrusion temperature, bead width and height, and layer-to-layer adhesion temperature for every Numerical Control (NC) block along the entire printing trajectory.

Once available commercially, xCognition and xTrude will enable manufacturers to evaluate, adopt, and deploy intelligent automation in a much shorter time with a substantially higher throughput and increased sustainability.

“Xaba’s novel automation, manufacturing, and advanced materials technology is very compelling, such that we believe they can have a great impact on the construction industry,” said Roger Poirier, co-founder of Hazelview Ventures. “Consistent with our investment strategy, we are looking forward to working with Xaba to unlock the full potential of their technology as it relates to sustainable construction.”

Hazelview Ventures, a wholly owned subsidiary and venture arm of Hazelview Investments Inc., is a Toronto based Real Estate owner and developer that manages CAD$11.8 billion in real estate assets and has a $10.9 billion development pipeline. Hazelview Ventures focuses exclusively on partnering with innovative, early-stage PropTech, BuildTech, and CleanTech companies that can be leveraged throughout their real estate portfolio and development projects.

In recent years, increased automation capabilities and improved sustainability have become key objectives for the construction Industry. Xaba’s technology has the potential to significantly improve sustainability in all aspects of construction and development, including automation enabling prefabrication, waste reduction, and sustainable materials.

About Xaba

Toronto-based Xaba develops new processes, control systems, and materials that automate and enable sustainable manufacturing. Its intellectual property uses artificial intelligence (AI) to control industrial robots and enable additive manufacturing machines to synthesize new materials or create true digital twins. Such applications have the potential to disrupt current business models, determine new manufacturing processes, and create new materials. For additional information, visit xaba.ai.

Source: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230216005493/en/Xaba-Closes-Seed-Funding-to-Drive-Intelligent-Automation-for-Sustainable-Manufacturing

Contacts

Media:
Lisa Ballard
Boulevard Public Relations
lisa@boulevardpr.com

Today, we’ll get a glimpse of Canada’s home-built Project Arrow electric vehicle when the wrap is raised on a couple of corners of the car in Windsor. That’ll be it though, at the annual conference of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association (APMA). It will just be a tease for the cameras, and a showcase for the Canadian manufacturers whose parts make up the car.

The powertrain and electronics are not quite ready, but the final car is on schedule to be ready for the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, says APMA President Flavio Volpe. It will then make the rounds of consumer shows and events across Canada in 2023.

“Every single item on the car was chosen with an eye to (being) commercially ready technology that you could sell to Toyota tomorrow, or Tesla tomorrow, or Mercedes-Benz,” he said. “It will be, I think, the most creative business card that we could have built for any of the companies that we represent.”

The APMA decided in 2019 to build a one-off electric car as a showcase for Canadian technology and expertise. The vehicle could not be too exotic – it had to represent an EV that might produce 50,000 vehicles a year, and would cost no more than $60,000.

A competition for the car’s design was won by a team from Carleton University’s School of Industrial Design in Ottawa. The APMA then invited Canadian companies to contribute their technology and from the 535 bids received, 58 were chosen for the vehicle.

One of those companies is Toronto-based Xaba, a startup that’s developed a composite polymer chassis, which can be created entirely with a 3D printer. Instead of the usual steel-and-aluminum chassis that underpins conventional vehicles and can include hundreds of parts, the Xaba chassis is made from a blend of ABS plastic and chopped carbon-fibre. Where needed for additional strength or support, a metal such as aluminum can be embedded into the plastic of the chassis that’s then printed around it. It’s produced in three parts – top, middle and bottom – that are simply bolted and glued together with a variance no more than a millimetre.

“We proposed to them that if you want to make an innovative car, it shouldn’t be done using metal,” said Max Moruzzi, chief executive officer of Xaba. “It should be done using a material that is much more sustainable in different aspects, not just from a cost point of view, because it doesn’t require any mining, but as well from a fabrication point of view, and as well from its functionality and performance.”

ABS plastic is similar to the plastic used for building Lego bricks, and it is considered a sustainable material because it can be chopped and ground up and reused for similar applications. It’s strengthened with about 20-per-cent carbon fibre, though not the same expensive material that’s used in exotic vehicles, so its cost is similar to a conventional metal alternative. Its total weight is about 300 kilograms, compared to around 500 kilograms for a metal chassis.

The Project Arrow chassis was printed in four days by a 3D printer in Italy using Xaba’s patented technology. The speed of printing can be increased with scale, and Moruzzi said the printer also uses a fraction of the energy needed to create a conventional chassis – about 33 kilowatts per hour, compared to at least 500 kilowatts for the metallic version.

“I worked with the rest of the APMA team, and some of the individuals they hired for this project are professionals from Aston Martin and McLaren,” Moruzzi said. “When I had to tell them that they had to redesign completely how they make the chassis, because a metallic chassis cannot work with a polymer, that was an interesting discussion, I can tell you.”

The Project Arrow EV will not be crash-tested to prove the strength of its build, but Volpe says that is unnecessary at this stage.

“The intelligent modelling now is so incredibly accurate that you don’t have to crash test, physically,” he said – it’s only when the vehicle is completely designed and ready for production that prototypes would be built for actual crashing, to prove the engineers correct.

“The two levels of government would like to see an automotive startup culture here – we have all the components, but we also have to be a little creative. You can’t ask an entrepreneur to take their first $20-million and throw it against the wall.”

The APMA received $5-million in federal funding for the development of the Project Arrow EV, as well as $1.8-million from the Ontario government and $1.4-million from the Quebec government. Volpe estimates that the cost of research provided by the various companies chosen to contribute to the car makes it a $20-million investment.

Moruzzi considers Xaba’s involvement to be time and money well spent. The company is already working on providing plastic printed materials for a flying car that’s being developed in Boston.

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/drive/article-canadas-home-built-sustainable-ev-with-3d-printed-chassis-to-be-teased/

Augmenta Construction Platform enables contractors and engineers to design fully-detailed, code-compliant, and constructible designs in hours rather than weeks or months

TORONTO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Augmenta, the company automating building design for the construction industry, today announced it has emerged from stealth mode with US$4.1 million in seed funding to bring to market its design platform for the construction industry. The round was led by Hazelview Ventures with participation from Ferguson Ventures and Whiteshell Group Inc. The funds will be used to accelerate the development of the Augmenta Construction Platform (ACP); launch a pilot program for the Electrical System Design (ESD) module – the first of several solutions that have been built on Augmenta’s automated design platform; and grow the Augmenta team across sales, deployment, and customer support.

In the construction industry today, legacy tools and processes used for designing complex building systems like electrical, plumbing, and HVAC make it extremely difficult and time consuming to ensure designs are feasible for construction. Combined with time and resource pressures, this leads to errors that require significant rework, slowing down both design and construction and substantially increasing risk, uncertainty, and costs for contractors and engineers – and in turn real estate developers and owners. At a time when the industry faces talent and material shortages, and pressure mounts due to the inherent complexity of building design, Augmenta is providing innovative new technology to solve these challenges. Based on early customer trials, Augmenta is delivering enormous time and cost savings by bringing generative design to the construction industry. Through its technology platform, Augmenta is automating the entire design process for contractors and engineers, ensuring the designs they create are error-free, constructible, and optimized according to client needs, and created in hours instead of weeks.

Building designs produced using ACP are also sustainable. Since they are fully detailed, coordinated, and optimized, contractors can use less material in their designs, order only what they need, and significantly reduce wasteful errors and rework. Additionally, ACP optimizes building systems designs to ensure they use less energy and resources, thereby reducing environmental impact over the building’s life cycle.

“The construction industry continues to face major challenges due to manual design processes – and is ripe for disruption,” said Francesco Iorio, CEO and co-founder of Augmenta. “We are bringing a massive sea change to the industry by introducing technology that will make the transition from current manual design processes to generative design as fundamental as the shift from pen and paper to computers.”

Hazelview Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary and venture arm of Hazelview Investments Inc., focuses exclusively on partnering with innovative, early-stage PropTech, BuildTech, and CleanTech companies. Along with the seed investment, Hazelview Ventures is a strategic partner that will be incorporating the Augmenta platform in construction projects. This partnership will enable Augmenta to test, refine, and scale its platform at an enterprise level and bring efficiencies to Hazelview’s design and construction processes. Hazelview Investments manages CAD$11.6 billion in real estate assets and has a $4 billion development pipeline.

“Augmenta’s technology is a huge step forward for the construction industry and will help stakeholders achieve both cost savings and ESG benefits through waste reduction,” said Roger Poirier, co-founder of Hazelview Ventures. “We are excited to be partnered with such a ground-breaking company.” Concurrent with the investment in Augmenta, Poirier will join the Augmenta board of directors.

“We support innovation in the construction industry and invest in startups that enable significant productivity advancements to help our customers build better,” said Blake Luse, Managing Director at Ferguson Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Ferguson. “Augmenta’s approach in bringing Generative Design to the construction industry will drive efficiencies and help solve business challenges that our contractor customers are facing today. Ultimately, our investment in Augmenta will help skilled trade workers be more efficient on the jobsite and deliver environmental value by helping to reduce construction waste due to less jobsite rework.” Ferguson is a leading North American value-added distributor that provides expertise, solutions, and building supplies to plumbing, fire, HVAC, fabrication, and other trade professionals.

In preparation for the imminent launch of a pilot program for its first product – an automated design module for electrical engineers and contractors that generates fully constructible, code-compliant designs of electrical raceway routing – Augmenta has partnered with Interstates, an innovative electrical contractor based in the U.S. Interstates has helped co-design and test the electrical module over a period of several months in collaboration with Augmenta.

“In a very short period of time, we are seeing how dramatically Augmenta’s approach to automated design can reduce the cost of the design process,” said Josh Gillespie, BIM/VDC Director at Interstates. “It enables us to decrease the risk of inaccurately scoping time and cost estimates while drastically reducing the time it takes to complete estimates for bids. This gives us additional time to present fully considered design alternatives, thus positioning our company as a strategic partner to our clients, which include general contractors, engineering firms, developers, and owners.”

About Augmenta

Founded by the ex-Autodesk team that pioneered Generative Design, Augmenta is a software company that is driving a new level of efficiency for the construction industry by automating building design. The company’s flagship Augmenta Construction Platform (ACP) is being developed with a view to ensuring buildings are always designed to be energy efficient, use sustainable materials, are safer to build, and contribute less waste to landfill during construction. Once available commercially, this innovative new cloud-based platform – which uses artificial intelligence, including machine learning and mathematical optimization – will enable contractors and engineers to create error-free, constructible, code-compliant designs of buildings and systems in hours instead of weeks. For additional information, visit augmenta.ai.

Source: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220621005024/en/Augmenta-Emerges-from-Stealth-Mode-and-Raises-US4.1-Million-in-Seed-Funding-to-Automate-Building-Design-for-the-Construction-Industry

Energy Dome, a provider of utility-scale long-duration energy storage, has successfully launched its first CO2 Battery facility in Sardinia, Italy. This milestone marks the final de-risking of the CO2 Battery technology as Energy Dome enters the commercial scaling phase, becoming the first commercial long-duration energy storage technology on the market offering a reliable alternative to fossil fuels for dispatchable baseload power globally

The initial phase of operations has confirmed the performance of the CO2 Battery and its capability of storing energy for a long duration, all while maintaining highly competitive round-trip efficiency, without degradation or site dependency. The Sardinia demonstration project has proven this innovative process using off-the-shelf equipment available from a globally established supply chain, demonstrating that the rapid global deployment of the CO2 Battery is now possible with no bottlenecks.

“I am proud of our dedicated team and of our results. We can now provide an answer to the most pressing issue of our time: climate change,” said Energy Dome Founder and CEO Claudio Spadacini. “Our breakthrough technology, the CO2 Battery, is now commercially available to make cost-effective renewable energy dispatchable on a global scale.” 

Energy Dome’s CO2 Batteries can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world at less than half the cost of similar-sized lithium-ion battery storage facilities, and use readily available materials, such as carbon dioxide, steel and water. Energy Dome is now preparing for its first full-scale 20MW-200MWh plant. Its first commercial project, Commercial Operation Date, is expected to be deployed by the end of 2023.

Energy Dome began its operations in February 2020 and has progressed from a concept to full testing at multi-megawatt scale in just over two years. To achieve this, Energy Dome has tapped a team of experts in turbomachinery, process engineering and energy, with a proven track record in ventures designing novel turbines and building over 500MW of energy projects. This successful launch is also in part due to the unique nature of Energy Dome’s process, which integrates known components in a novel industrial process based on a thermodynamic transformation of CO2.

The company has already secured multiple commercial agreements, including with an Italian utility A2A for the construction of a first 20MW-5h facility. Earlier this year, Energy Dome also signed a non-exclusive license agreement with Ansaldo Energia, a major provider of power generation plants and components, to build long-duration energy storage projects in Italy, Germany, the Middle East and Africa.

Energy Dome’s plan is backed by investors including European deeptech venture capital firm 360 Capital, Barclays, Novum Capital Partners and Third Derivative. 

To fund the rapid commercial scale-up, Energy Dome plans to launch its Series B fundraising round for prospective investors interested in its groundbreaking energy storage technology.

Read the article here: https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/energy-dome-launches-world-s-first-co2-20220608