UK battery technology firm Anaphite has raised £1.4m in funding to expand its dry coating capabilities for lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes and graphite anodes.
The investment combines £700,000 in grant funding from the Innovate UK Investor Partnerships: Clean Energy and Climate Technologies competition with £700,000 from climate-focused venture capital funds, including Elbow Beach and World Fund.
The funding will be used to scale Anaphite’s proprietary DCP® technology platform, which engineers homogenous dry composite powders for the dry coating of nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cathodes. The company plans to extend the platform to enable high-throughput, high-yield production of dry coated LFP cathodes and graphite anodes.
Manufacturing LFP cathodes is more than twice as energy-intensive per kWh as producing NMC cathodes with medium-to-high nickel content. Optimising material mixing and electrode coating, which account for 30–40% of total cell manufacturing energy and cost, represents a key opportunity for reducing both costs and carbon emissions for battery cell producers and electric vehicle manufacturers.
LFP is expected to account for over 55% of global cathode demand by 2030, driving urgent demand for scalable dry coating technologies. However, producing dry coated LFP cathodes remains more technically challenging than NMC, with no commercial-scale solution yet proven.
Anaphite CEO Joe Stevenson said the funding would allow the company to tackle “one of the toughest technical challenges in dry coating – successfully manufacturing LFP electrodes.” He added that the company’s DCP® technology had already proven effective with NMC formulations and could deliver similar cost and carbon reductions for LFP.
The latest generation of LFP, known as Gen IV, has particle sizes of 0.7–3 microns, compared with 3–20 microns for NMC. The higher surface area of LFP particles presents significant challenges for achieving homogenous mixing and dry film formation, which Anaphite believes its expertise in nanomaterials and dry coating can overcome.
Craig Douglas, partner at World Fund, said the investment would “significantly expand [Anaphite’s] commercial capabilities, accelerating the scale-up of its manufacturing processes and driving down manufacturing costs for the global battery industry.”
Key objectives of the project include producing dry coated LFP cathodes and graphite anodes using roll-to-roll coating techniques, followed by full-cell assembly and testing to validate first cycle efficiency and cycle life. Success could open the door to mass-market adoption of dry coating for a broader range of electrode materials.
The project aligns with the UK Government’s Advanced Manufacturing Plan, supporting the country’s Industrial Strategy and growth in strategically important battery technologies. It is also expected to support expansion in the UK’s battery energy storage system (BESS) sector, which is projected to account for the majority of new storage capacity by 2030, with LFP emerging as the most widely used chemistry.
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