Shift Thermal raises about a $1 million bridge round
It was led by Queen City Angels with participation by Market Square Ventures, Three Roots Capital, InvestTN, and the Clean Energy Venture Group.
Shift Thermal recently closed a bridge round of funding for about $1 million to get to a goal of transferring the technology that the company has developed to industry.
That’s according to Levon Atoyan, the company’s Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, who said the lead investor was Queen City Angels with participation by Market Square Ventures, Three Roots Capital, InvestTN, and the Clean Energy Venture Group.
“We are pursuing multiple technology transfer agreements,” he said.
The company, known as Active Energy Systems until about two and one-half years ago when it rebranded as Shift Thermal, was in the initial 2017 cohort of the “Innovation Crossroads” program operated by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Mitch Ishmael, a Knoxville native who serves as the other Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, and Atoyan met while they were pursuing their Ph.Ds. at Cornell University. Both shared a passion to help solve for the missing link in the world’s sustainable energy future: energy storage, specifically ice thermal storage.
Unfortunately, Atoyan said that “every cold thermal storage company (that has been founded) in the commercial and industrial space has seen major deployment challenges.” That has led them to broaden their perspective from manufacturing the storage devices to licensing the technology.
“We are specialists in our technology,” he says.
As such, Atoyan says that Shift Thermal is looking at a broad set of applications – from residential heat pumps that the company might co-develop to big data centers where it would license the technology to original equipment manufacturers.
“We are worrying less about scaling deployment and more about how to commercialize the technology through industry partnerships,” he explains.
With that in mind, Shift Thermal has added two well-placed advisors.
- One is Jeff McCay, Co-Founder and President of Top Five Inc., a Chattanooga-based enterprise that invests in mature industrial markets in strong growth segments and also in advance technology markets that impact emerging market segments such as electric vehicles and advanced materials.
- Deborah Langer, one of the team of CXO at BRITE Energy Innovators, a consultancy that specializes in advanced energy and climate tech, supporting start-ups in sectors such as battery technology and energy storage.
Today, the company that has two locations across the street from each other on Midway Lane in Oak Ridge is installing a unit at the Oak Ridge Civic Center for operation this summer in collaboration with the City of Oak Ridge and the Tennessee Valley Authority.
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