We are excited to announce that we’ve led the $3.5M seed round of Moment Energy, with participation from our friends at Fika Ventures, Garage Capital and MCJ Collective. This is our third cleantech announcement in recent weeks, following announcements for EnergyBank, deep ocean long-term energy storage, and EnPowered, a payment platform to increase the rate of cleantech adoption. 

Moment Energy is creating sustainable energy storage systems by repurposing retired electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Imagine an affordable solution that can help off-grid commercial customers, such as remote lodges, mining sites and fisheries that currently rely on costly diesel generators, transition to renewables. Or help industrial customers cut utility costs by hundreds of thousands per year with energy storage for peak shaving.

Moment’s solution is based on repurposing, rather than recycling, EV batteries. When you recycle a battery, you recover and/or dispose of the battery’s heavy toxic chemicals so they don’t contaminate the environment. However, EV batteries have an average of 80% life left when retired from a car. And most of these batteries are sitting on shelves or in landfills because recycling costs are too high. By giving these batteries a second life, Moment can produce a highly affordable energy product, while reducing lithium waste. It’s the circular economy in action. 

The company’s mission is to repurpose all EV batteries for second-life use by 2030. They are already working with major automotive companies, including Nissan. And they’re building a novel battery software management system which is optimized for second-life batteries.

Beyond the mission, we are very excited about Moment’s team. The co-founders (Edward Chiang, Sumreen Rattan, Gabriel Soares, and Gurmesh Sidhu) became best friends in university when they worked together to build electric race vehicles. They’ve bootstrapped Moment Energy to date, tripling the size of their team and deploying their system at several sites across Canada.

You can keep in touch with Moment Energy’s progress via Twitter or LinkedIn. And if you want to join their mission to repurpose all EV batteries for second life, the team is hiring!