Hot off the block start-up MGA Thermal raises $8.25m for energy storage

A start-up founded by two former university professors has raised $8.25m to ramp up its production of blocks which store thermal energy for reuse.

MGA Thermal chief executive and co-founder Erich Kisi and chief commercial officer Mark Croudace.

A Newcastle-based thermal energy start-up founded by two former academics has raised $8.25m as it moves to ramp up production tenfold over the next two years.

MGA Thermal was founded by former University of Newcastle materials science professor Erich Kisi and associate lecturer Alex Post in 2018.

Since then, the start-up has garnered a lot of interest over its products, including a 25cm x 20cm x 10cm block that can store thermal energy – and the technology to extract that energy.

MGA Thermal uses gas to extract energy from its blocks which passes to a boiler system.

“It’s a closed loop so the gas that extracts the heat, passes that heat to the boiler system and then re-enters the storage at the other end, meaning there are very few losses in that process,” Mr Kisi said.

One of the key selling points for MGA Thermal is that it can run its energy charging and extraction processes at the same time.

“We take electricity that’s renewable generated and we use radiant heaters to heat the blocks.

“It’s actually really versatile because the heating and the heat extraction systems are separate and that means you can run them at the same time.”

The start-up is able to manufacture 1000 blocks per day that have the capacity to store about 1.4 megawatt hours of thermal energy.

The MGA Thermal blocks which store heat be reused as energy.

MGA Thermal deputy CEO and chief commercial officer Mark Croudace said the latest round of funding would go toward expanding the start-up’s commercial ability.

“This funding will help us to build out our engineering team and that will support the further scale-up of our manufacturing plant,” he said.

“From a manufacturing perspective, our target is to grow at least 10 times roughly every 24 months.”

The latest funding round was led by existing investors including Main Sequence, the venture capital arm of Mr Post’s former employer CSIRO.

Varley Holdings, Melt Ventures and New Zealand’s Climate Venture Capital Fund all supported the fund raising as well as new investors Pollination and Understorey Ventures.

Over the past four years MGA Thermal has raised a total of $17m in capital, including the latest round, as well as receiving $6m in federal grants.

Main Sequence partner Martin Duursma said his firm believed MGA Thermal would play a pivotal part in Australia’s energy future.

“As energy markets continue to transition to renewables and traditional generation sources are shuttered, the long duration energy storage that MGA Thermal delivers is a key enabler to a reliable and stable grid,” he said.

Meanwhile, a cybersecurity start-up promising protection across all of a customer’s cloud service has raised $US10m ($15m) with backing from Atlassian.

Plerion, which is based in Sydney, provides support for customers of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Workspaces.

The start-up’s seed round was led by Prosus Ventures, with participation from Cercano and Atlassian Ventures.

Plerion chief executive Mike Rahmati said the new funding would help expand its footprint and headcount.

“With the new funding, we are committed to continuous innovation, attracting top-tier talent, and enhancing our platform to provide unparalleled value to our clients and partners,” he said.

Peter Lenke, head of Atlassian Ventures, said he backed Plerion as its cybersecurity solution would go a long way in helping Atlassian’s own 200,000 customers.

“Plerion’s all-in-one security platform, combined with their visionary approach to protecting digital assets, aligns perfectly with Atlassian’s efforts to make prioritising security simple,” he said.

Originally published as Hot off the block start-up MGA Thermal raises $8.25m for energy storage