Another Portland metro battery energy storage company is showing signs of strong growth.
ZincFive Inc., which makes rechargeable nickel-zinc battery systems that provide emergency backup power, announced a $54 million Series D funding round on Tuesday. That brings the Tualatin company’s total funding to $139 million.
Helios Climate Ventures led the round, joined by fellow earlier investors Senator Investment Group and Standard Industries. New investors include OGCI Climate Investments, a fund established by oil and gas majors, and Japan Energy Fund.
ZincFive bills its technology as a better alternative to lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries, on power density, safety and sustainability counts.
“ZincFive’s nickel-zinc battery energy storage solutions are powerful, reliable, safe, and highly sustainable, having significantly lower end-to-end climate impact than alternative battery chemistries,” Jesse Johnson, managing director at Helios, said in a statement. “As a result, the market is responding with commercial demand spiking and the customer roster rapidly expanding.”
ZincFive batteries made initial inroads in traffic control systems. The company then began targeting data centers and other IT infrastructure, industrial engine starting and other use cases.
ZincFive, founded in 2015, said the funding would go toward channel and product development and boosting production capacity.
“It is great to see our current investors returning in the Series D round as well as to welcome new investors who recognize the current commercial success and substantial future company growth,” ZincFive co-founder and CEO Tim Hysell said. “We are grateful to the investor community for their fervent support of ZincFive’s mission and global expansion. We look forward to continuing to bring innovative nickel-zinc technology to the market.”
ZincFive is one of several battery energy storage companies that have blossomed in the region in recent years. Among the others: Powin, which supplies lithium-ion systems for one-to-four-hour grid-scale energy storage, and ESS, which provides longer-duration grid storage with a novel flow battery system. Entek is also a player in the sector as a major supplier of battery components, including lithium-ion separators.
More tangentially, Goldman Sachs Asset Management is backing GridStor, a major energy storage project developer and operator in Portland.
