PORTFOLIO
Sector
Autonomous Technology, Energy, Sustainability
Founded
2017
Located
Sawston, Cambridge (UK)
Echion Technologies was born in the labs of the University of Cambridge Engineering Department. The company was spun-out in 2017 with the ongoing support of Cambridge Enterprise and our academic co-founders Adam Boies and Michael De Volder.
The company is now based in Sawston, Cambridge (UK), where our state-of-the-art facilities are fully equipped to invent the battery materials of tomorrow, produce them at the pilot scale, and integrate them into battery cells.
After 6 years of R&D, Echion has launched its XNO™ anode materials. These are now available at scale to cell manufacturers looking to build Li-ion cells with market-leading safety, cycle-life, and fast-charging capabilities. Echion and its commercial partners have demonstrated industrial cells withs >12,000 cycles of useful life, outstanding performance in UN safety tests, and >10-C charge capability. On a like-for-like comparison, our anode materials enable us to achieve double the energy density of best-in-class commercial LTO cells (>400 Wh/L,>130 Wh/kg demonstrated) and 75% higher power density in charge and discharge HPPC tests.
Echion XNO™ materials are based on proprietary mixed niobium oxide compositions and microparticle designs protected by 12 patent families. The unique crystal structures of our materials have been engineered to enable the intercalation of lithium ions with exceptionally fast diffusion coefficients, safe electrochemical potential above SEI formation, and little-to-no volumetric expansion. Our anode materials are easy to process into high volumetric capacity electrodes (typically double that of LTO anodes), maintain excellent performance at both low and high temperatures, and do not generate gas under formation cycling or nominal operation.
CBMM (Brazil), the world’s largest niobium producer, holds a minority stake in Echion through a recent equity investment. Niobium is neither rare nor expensive when compared to typical cathode materials. Through this relationship, we are able to provide guaranteed access to large volume, high-quality XNO™ materials with exceptional price stability and cost-effectiveness to penetrate the markets described above. Echion and its manufacturing partners are rapidly scaling-up production to meet commercial demand. We are already able to supply multi-tonne batches in 2022 and will be able to supply 10’s of tonnes batches in 2023 and 100’s of tonnes batches in 2024.
Echion is committed to rigorous and transparent sharing of data with our customers and partners. All Echion claims are supported by testing data, validated in many cases by a third party, which can be shared upon request.