Planar Energy Devices Secures $4 Million in Venture Financing, Is Spun Out of U.S. DOE's National Renewable Energy Lab

Business Wire, Oct 22, 2007

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Power-storage start-up Planar Energy Devices (Planar) has secured $4 million in a Series A venture-financing commitment from Princeton, N.J.-based Battelle Ventures and its Knoxville, Tenn.-based affiliate fund, Innovation Valley Partners (IVP). The company, which is developing thin-film batteries, is a spinout of the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, Colo.

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," explained 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 said, "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."

"Thin-film batteries are projected to grow into a multi-billion-dollar component of the overall $55-billion energy-storage market, driven by wireless communications and such applications as smart cards, RFID and sensors," said Battelle Ventures General Partner Kef Kasdin. "We believe that Planar has great opportunity for success in these target markets, as well as in opening entirely new market applications for energy-storage solutions."

Kasdin, who, with Faris and IVP General Partner Glenn Kline, sits on the Planar Board of Directors, added, "we look for capital-efficient investment opportunities where there is significantly differentiated, breakthrough technology addressing key problems in a sector, and Planar meets those criteria."

Noting that the $220-million fund's sole limited partner, Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle), manages or co-manages facilities of the U.S. Departments of Energy and Homeland Security, she said that the way this investment developed is "an excellent example of how we can leverage our unique position and act as 'founder capitalists,' building companies from the ground up."

Kasdin explained that she had become aware of a differentiated power-storage technology created at NREL and that Battelle Ventures and IVP had funded a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement that validated it and financed prototype development.

She said that she hired Faris, who had been CEO of Waveguide Solutions, a developer of planar lightwave circuit and microsystem products that was a spinout of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and COO of Ocean Optics, a precision-optical-component and fiber-optic-instrument spinout of the University of South Florida, to help develop the business plan for an NREL spinout to commercialize the technology and manufacture thin-film batteries.

She then recruited him, she said, for the chief executive position and introduced Planar to researchers doing complementary work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. Today, Planar is a licensee of both NREL and ORNL technologies.

In other Planar news

Faris also said that the company has received a $50,000 Florida High Tech Corridor Council (FHTCC) industry matching grant for a Planar-University of Central Florida collaborative research project.

"Planar has great promise to deliver technology that is safe and highly compact, and greatly extends the cyclic stability of batteries," said FHTCC President Randy Berridge. "The thin-film devices have the capability of opening new markets in medical technology, aerospace, defense, transportation and electronics. This is exactly the type of innovation we like to support in the Corridor."

For more information about Planar Energy Devices, go to www.planarenergy.com.

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