LightSail Energy, a US-based compressed air energy storage technology, has extended its series D round by $5.5m from France-based oil major Total’s corporate venturing unit.
LightSail initially raised $37.3m in its D round in November from angel investors Peter Thiel and Bill Gates and venture capital firm Khosla Ventures and Innovacorp, a Nova Scotia, Canada, investment company.
François Badoual, chief executive of Total Energy Ventures and a member of the Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist 100, said: “Energy storage is an important enabler for the long-term development of alternative energies and to ensure the stability of electricity supply.”
At the initial close of the D round, Steve Crane, co-founder and chief executive of LightSail, said: “We’ve proven that our transformative thermodynamics [the science of heat transfer and utilization] technology works at scale…. We want to democratize energy – to enable renewable sources to supply energy on demand locally and at a lower cost than centralized fossil-fuel based generation.”
LightSail’s technology, developed by Danielle Fong, LightSail’s co-founder and chief scientist, is able to convert electrical energy to compressed air, and then reverse the process to deliver electrical energy again when it’s needed.
Fong entered Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia at age 12 to study physics.