Skip to content

Burnaby tech firm that reduces 'human footprint' gets $5 million from feds

Nano One Materials Corporation - a Burnaby company involved in the production of lithium ion battery materials - has received $5 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
nano one
(From left to right) Jonathan Wilkinson, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, and Dan Blondal, CEO of Nano One Materials at the firm's Burnaby offices on Friday. JANAYA FULLER-EVANS

Nano One Materials Corporation - a Burnaby company involved in the production of lithium ion battery materials - has received $5 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada.

Sustainable Development Technology Canada is a foundation created by the government of Canada to support environmental innovation and technologies.

“SDTC’s investment in Nano One marks a very important milestone for us,” company CEO and founder Dan Blondal said at the funding announcement on Friday. “It will help us accelerate and scale-up activities that we currently have underway with industrial partners and collaborators that range anywhere from industrial storage space to electric vehicles.”

He also noted it was the second batch of funding from SDTC, which gave the company $2 million in seed funding in 2015.

“We are honoured to have earned SDTC’s confidence again and we look forward to expanding our operations and accelerating our business activities with our present partners and also with future partners,” he said.

He also announced Volkswagen Group Research has joined the consortium of companies Nano One works with as a project contributor.

“We look forward to reducing the human footprint, which I think everyone here believes very, very strongly in and it motivates us and gets us up in the morning,” Blondal said.

Jonathan Wilkinson, Federal Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, spoke on behalf of Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development.

“I am very excited to announce an investment of $5 million in Nano One Materials right here in Burnaby, in support of its daily advanced battery materials project through SDTC,” he said. “This latest investment supports Nano One and its novel three step process to improve the chemistry inside lithium ion batteries, an advancement that is entirely applicable to consumer electronics and the storage of renewable energy.

“Nano One’s low cost production of high performance ion batteries will go a long way to fight climate change and in cleaning our air by decreasing energy outputs,” he added

The issue of clean technology has been one that is of particular interest to Wilkinson, he said.

“Before I ran for elected office in 2015 I had spent almost 20 years as a chief executive officer and a senior executive in British Columbia’s cleantech industry in a number of different companies,” Wilkinson said. “I have continued to take an active interest in the progress of cleantech.”

It is an area the federal government wants to focus on, he added.

“We see clean tech as a critical enabler for both Canada to meet its Paris and beyond Paris, to 2050, emissions with respect to greenhouse gases but also to ensure that Canada is positioning itself thoughtfully from an economic perspective,” he said.