Liquid Metal Battery (LMBC), a US-based developer of battery technology for grid-scale electricity storage, has raised $15m in its series B round from a consortium including French oil major Total as a repeat investor.
Venture capital firm Khosla Ventures led the B round, and was joined by software company Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Gates and Total, which has Sophie de Richecour, head of the future science and technologies department at the oil major on the portfolio company’s board, had invested in LMBC’s A round in May last year.
The Liquid Metal Battery – where all the active materials, the cathode, anode, and electrolyte, are in a liquid form at high temperatures (see picture) – was invented in the lab of Donald Sadoway, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Andrew Chung, one of six partners at Khosla Ventures and head of its China activities, has joined LMBC’s board having backed Sadoway’s research in 2009.
His laboratory received a three-year $6.9m grant from the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E research agency two years ago and a four-year, $4m grant from Total, acording to news provider CNET.