Gaia Membranes is one of two winners in the Venture Kick final and is set to receive 130,000 francs. The startup based in Windisch is a spin-off from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI). Its goal is to enable efficient and affordable energy storage technology.
According to a Venture Kick press release, lithium ion batteries are currently the technology of choice for consumer electronics and electric vehicles. They have a discharge efficiency of nearly 90 percent. However, they also have problems, such as rapid charge deterioration and short lifetime, a highly-flammable and explosive chemistry and expensive end-of-life management. The press release highlights vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFBs) as an emerging technology that scales more easily than lithium ion batteries. The issue with VRFBs is the relatively low efficiency of 75 percent.
Gaia Membranes has developed an ion exchange membrane product that can boost the efficiency of VRFBs by up to 15 percent. The product is made using a proprietary process, for which a patent is pending. A major advantage is the significant reduction in production costs compared to competing materials.
With the kick funding, the startup plans to accelerate its manufacturing scale-up and bring a first product to market by the end of 2019, said Elian Pusceddu, co-founder and CEO of Gaia Membranes.
The other winner of the Venture Kick funding is Viventis Microscopy. This spin-off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) is creating a novel light-sheet microscope system to address the limitations associated with confocal and current light-sheet microscopes.
