OurNext Energy

History

2021: Attracting $25 million investment

On October 18, 2021, BMW and Bill Gates funds invested in OurNext Energy, which is developing advanced batteries for electric vehicles. The startup completed the Series A funding round, raising $25 million.

Among the Series A investors of the BMW iVenture round, Assembly Ventures and Volta Energy, which is partnering with Argonne National Laboratory, another investor is Singapore electronics maker Flex Limited, which is a strategic partner for OurNext Energy.

BMW and the Bill Gates Foundation have invested in a developer of cheap batteries for electric vehicles OurNext

The round was led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the investment arm of Breakthrough Energy, which was founded by Bill Gates in 2015 to support and finance innovation to combat climate change, and supported by people like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson.

OurNext Energy is working on a double battery that combines a cell design that uses cathodes without cobalt and nickel, as well as a second, high-energy unit. The first, potentially increasing the range of the car to 1207 km. The company uses a hybrid battery approach and allows the battery to cope with daily trips and frequent charging. It is this hybrid approach that can allow a company to succeed where others have failed. The key point of the hybrid concept is chemical elements: Aries is a lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemical element. This is important because LFP is an older and cheaper formula, which is traditionally considered less energy intensive than more powerful nickel-based batteries. However, OurNext Energy claims that its Aries battery pack has managed to reduce the cost while avoiding the disadvantages of nickel batteries, namely dependence on scarce raw materials such as nickel and cobalt.

Founder and CEO of OurNext Energy Mujib Ijaz, a battery systems engineer with more than 30 years of experience in, and Ford Motor Apple A123 Systems, noted that the new investments raised will help the company grow and will also be a magnet for other technologies. Mujib Ejaz said the new investment will help in research and development, ranging from () software ON for batteries and power electronics to artificial intelligence () and. AI Machine Learning The founder emphasized that OurNext Energy plans to go from raw materials to the production of battery cells, adding that in 2022 the company may seek additional funding and partners in order to expand its production.

The hybrid battery approach allows Mujib Ijaz and his team of engineers to combine one battery that handles daily trips and frequent recharges with another designed to increase the range of long trips. The basic chemical composition of each battery is adapted for their respective tasks.^[1]

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