NREL Battery-Technology Spinoff Secures Financing

Planar Energy Devices (Planar), a lithium-battery technology star-up company, has secured $4 million in a Series-A venture-financing commitment from Battelle Ventures and its affiliate fund, Innovation Valley Partners. Planar is developing thin-film lithium batteries, and is a spinoff of the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Planar is a licensee of both NREL and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) technologies.

Planar “is developing the next generation of thin-film lithium battery technologies by bringing together innovative and scalable technologies from a variety of research organizations,” explains company founder and CEO Scott Faris, who noted that Planar had received $1.3 million, with another $2.7 million committed, “based on milestones to be achieved.” Faris also states, “while there is a lot of experimentation with new exotic energy-storage materials, the company’s investors and I believe that lithium has significantly more potential than today’s batteries utilize and can be to power storage what silicon is to semiconductors.”