Impact-focused venture capital firm Elbow Beach Capital is leading a £900,000 round in energy storage startup Allye, UKTN can reveal.
The startup, which came out of stealth this month, turns electric vehicle battery packs into portable energy storage systems.
Allye’s first product, “the Max”, is a transportable 300kWh capacity battery – enough to power a factory for two days or 40 homes for a day, the company says. Capacity can be increased by attaching more.
The £900,000 will be put towards the commercial production of the Max, with orders rolling out to customers in Q3 this year and targeting 10,000 before 2030.
The startup plans to expand its battery solutions to the hospitality industry and the residential market, the company’s CEO Jonathan Carrier told UKTN.
With products like the Max, Carrier says the idea is to provide cheaper alternatives to more well know solutions that are “very expensive and way beyond the remit of most people”.
Carrier added: “When it comes to the higher energy prices they can afford the technology and they also reap a lot of the benefit of having that technology, because they live in a detached property, have solar on the roof so they can benefit from all of this.”
This leaves those living in terrace properties and apartments unable to afford other solutions or lacking the physical space.
In 2024, the energy startup anticipates revenue of around £8.5m and £45m the year after that.
Every battery made by Allye will have an entirely different makeup due to using cheaper recycled materials . Each one will have a digital twin for suport.
“Because every unit is connected to the cloud we will be able to augment and validate our model but also update it with real-world data,” explained Carrier. “That allows us then to update the battery management system for the entire system and send that back to the unit over the air.”
Machine learning and AI are also being implemented by the London-based business to work out the most optimal ways to both help the grid and save consumers money.
Elbow Beach Capital supplied £650,000 in the round, with Alpha Future Funds topping up the remaining £250,000.
Two of Allye’s co-founders bring experience from the electric vehicle brand Arrival, which recently scrapped its second merger with a special purpose acquisition company amid financial woes. Jack Levy was a validation engineer at Arrival, while Lorenzo Bergamaschi was a battery test engineer.
The third is Carrier, who co-founded the portable EV charging company ZipCharge.
Investing in climate-friendly tech, Elbow Beach Capital’s portfolio contains a broccoli upcycling startup from Shropshire, a company making construction panels out of cardboard and EV manufacturer Munro Vehicles.