Vanadium flow battery maker to set up 200 MWh factory

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Startup VFlowTech, a spinoff of Nanyang Technology University in Singapore, has completed its oversubscribed Series A funding round with $14.4 million from both corporate and personal investors.

The company says it will put the capital towards setting up a 200 MWh capacity production line. It will also help the company expand its market presence to Turkey, the US, Japan and India via new partners.

VFlowTech says it also plans to scale up the manufacturing of its larger 250 kWh modular PowerCube product. To date, the company has many deployments of its residential 30 kWh and 100 kWh units, but is now ready to cater to larger-scale customers.

VFlowTech’s PowerCube products have been deployed across Australia, the preferred technology of vanadium hopeful VSun, owned by miner Australian Vanadium Limited.

Led by Japan-based venture capital firm Real Tech Holdings, investors in the Series A round included Seeds Capital, Wavemaker Partners, Sing Fuels, Pappas Capital, Carbon Zero Venture Capital and Turkey’s İnci Holding.

The round comes just over a year after the company secured $4.3 million in a pre-Series A financing series.

Vanadium batteries

Vanadium is one of the key materials Australia is looking to both mine and refine here in Australia – with projects primarily based in Western Australia and Queensland.

On top of lithium, Australia is the world’s top producer of titanium and the second largest producer of zircon and rare earth elements. The nation’s reserves of critical minerals like antimony, cobalt, lithium, manganese ore, niobium, tungsten and vanadium, rank in the top five globally.

Image: Future Battery Industries Cooperative Research Centre

In January, the Queensland government announced it would invest $75 million in a critical minerals demonstration facility in Townsville, which will process primarily vanadium, and also cobalt, high purity alumina, and rare earth elements.

Likewise, there are a number of vanadium mines and connected projects looking to get off the ground in the coming years, including the Australian Vanadium Project owned by Western Australian company Australian Vanadium Limited, or AVL. It is looking to build a vanadium mine near Meekatharra in the state’s midwest.

Perth-based mining technology company TNG Limited, which recently changed its name to Tivian Limited following a shareholder uprising which saw the company’s incumbent leadership ousted, is still working towards realising its vanadium Mount Peake Project in the Northern Territory.

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