Unbound Potential has raised €14.4 million in fresh capital in a financing round. This brings the cleantech start-up closer to realising a new generation of energy storage: the redox flow battery. Until 2024, the start-up spent a year in the RUNWAY Startup Incubator and the ZHAW Front Runner project at Technopark Winterthur.
Unbound Potential can accelerate the development of its membrane-free redox flow battery with €14.4 million. The cleantech company, founded in 2023, raised this sum in a pre-seed financing round. It consists of €8 million in non-dilutive grants and €6.4 million in additional funding.
According to a statement from Venturelab in Schlieren, the fresh capital will also help Unbound Potential to push ahead with its first pilot projects. The young company is one of Venturelab’s top 100 Swiss start-ups.
Unbound Potential’s redox flow battery decouples performance from capacity. According to the technical description, this means that scaling this energy storage system is as simple as adding more storage fluid. Until now, such flow batteries faced a major hurdle: the stack. Conventional stacks are based on sensitive 2D membranes. These, in turn, consist of hundreds of layers that are costly to manufacture and difficult to scale.
‘We have solved this problem,’ says Unbound Potential. ‘Our breakthrough makes the membrane completely redundant and reduces the stack to just two robust components.’ The Thalwil-based company’s redox flow battery stores energy in two liquid electrolytes without membranes. This is intended to reduce manufacturing complexity and costs and enable rapid scaling of stationary storage systems with minimal maintenance.
From 2023 to 2024, Unbound Potential was part of the RUNWAY Startup Incubator and the ZHAW Front Runner project at Technopark Winterthur. During this time, they won the Business Concept Course Competition and laid important foundations for their further development, as reported by STARTUP CAMPUS on LinkedIn.
Unbound Potential will demonstrate its system in pilot projects, including a collaboration with Amazon to electrify logistics and with the newly emerging FlexBase technology centre on Europe’s largest redox flow storage project at Stern in Laufenburg AG. A pilot plant is scheduled to go into operation in mid-2026. ce/mm
