CIOInsider India Magazine
Offgrid Energy Labs Raises $ 15 Million in Funding Round
Battery tech startup Offgrid Energy Labs has risen $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Archean Chemical Industries, with participation from existing investor Ankur Capital.
The funding will be used to build a pilot manufacturing facility for its patented ZincGel technology in the UK, which uses zinc-bromine chemistry for stationary energy storage. This facility will serve as a testbed before the company establishes a gigawatt-scale plant in India.
The startup, which has been around for seven years and was incubated at IIT Kanpur, has created a unique zinc-bromine battery system as a substitute for lithium-ion technology. Named ZincGel, it provides 80–90 percent of the energy efficiency found in traditional lithium batteries, but at a considerably reduced levelized cost of storage, according to the startup.
With the increase in global power demand, nations are intensifying their initiatives to enhance renewable energy storage. India, as a major country in this context, intends to expand its non-fossil energy capacity ten times — from 50 gigawatts to 500 gigawatts — by 2030.
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New Delhi aims for 236 gigawatt-hours of battery energy storage capacity by 2031-32 and revealed a ₹54 billion (approximately $612 million) funding initiative in June to create 30 gigawatt-hour battery storage systems within the nation. Nonetheless, similar to numerous international markets, India encounters a significant obstacle: China’s supremacy in the lithium supply chain.
Not only should we be addressing a gap in the market from an application standpoint, but we should also make it financially viable, because there have been technologies and batteries in the past globally, which have the solution, but they’re so expensive that they’re not widely adopted
The startup has secured $15 million in Series A funding to expand its operations. A 10-megawatt-hour demonstration facility is set to be constructed in the UK, anticipated to be completed by early 2026, followed by the commercialization of ZincGel in subsequent quarters — with a gigafactory in India slated for the next stage.
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“Not only should we be addressing a gap in the market from an application standpoint, but we should also make it financially viable, because there have been technologies and batteries in the past globally, which have the solution, but they’re so expensive that they’re not widely adopted,” says Tejas Kusurkar, co-founder and CEO of Offgrid Energy Labs.
