From start-up to industry step-change: interview with Alex Hewitt, COO

Sam Burrow – our CTO and Co-Founder – and I first crossed paths in 2016 at the Coventry University Innovation Centre. He was developing some fascinating work with graphene, and our conversations quickly became a fixture of my week. After digging into the composites he was creating, I became convinced there was real commercial potential.

We spent a lot of evenings at my flat bouncing ideas around – literally scrawled in red marker pen on my kitchen cupboard doors. Unfortunately, it was permanent ink, and those stubborn pink stains ended up costing me my deposit. In early 2018, my mum lent us £3,000 to file our first patent, which in turn helped us secure our initial investment round that summer. By July of that year we had left university to pursue Anaphite full-time, driven by the belief that Sam’s technology could have real societal impact at scale.

My focus is on raising capital, strategic direction, and making sure the company delivers on what it commits to. A lot of our early customer relationships grew out of connections I made at industry conferences, while Sam would take the technical insights from those conversations and use them to develop our ideas.

Over time we’ve built a strong complementary partnership. Sam has a natural inclination to explore lots of technology avenues, he’s the one who first identified the opportunity in dry coating. I try to focus the business, to make sure we’re not spread too thin. Our CEO Joe Stevens brings a steadying commercial perspective to that dynamic, drawing on his background in business and corporate leadership. Between the three of us, we’ve struck a great balance.

At its heart, our technology challenges the way battery cell electrodes have been made for decades. The conventional wet slurry process relies on toxic solvents and enormous drying ovens (some over 100 metres in length), that consume vast quantities of energy and floor space.

Our Dry Coating Precursor, or DCP®, is a film-forming composite powder, tailored to customer’s requirements – power, performance, sustainability targets etc. Our DCP® powders behave like kinetic sand: granular when loose, cohesive under pressure. During electrode manufacture it compacts into a smooth, flexible layer that bonds firmly to the current collector – with no need for a drying oven at all.

The performance gains are significant. Switching to DCP® can cut coating-process energy use by up to 85%, reduce cell production costs by up to 40%, and shrink a factory’s manufacturing footprint by around 15%.

We’re currently working with automotive OEMs and Tier One suppliers that together account for more than 40% of global car production. The industry has been trying to make dry coating a reality for years, and the business case for doing so is compelling. Fully implementing dry coating across both anodes and cathodes can reduce the cost of an EV’s battery pack by up to 2%. In high-volume automotive manufacturing, where saving fractions of a penny on a single component can represent an enormous cumulative gain, that figure is transformative.

Our customers are currently integrating and validating our technology within their processes. Beyond cost, it will help them meet tightening regulatory requirements, including Europe’s EV battery regulations, which place increasing demands on the carbon credentials of battery manufacturing.

Two stand out clearly. The first was bringing Joe Stevens on board as CEO. His experience as a former commercial director at Johnson Matthey gave us something we lacked at that stage – seasoned leadership in navigating complex commercial relationships, and the confidence that combination gave investors.

The second was the strategic decision to focus exclusively on dry coating. At an early stage it’s tempting to pursue multiple applications for new technology, and we explored quite a few. But concentrating all our energy on solving this one problem transformed us from a materials science venture into a company developing critical infrastructure for the energy transition. Our most meaningful breakthroughs have come from that focus.

On a personal level, it’s been learning to manage my own expectations – accepting that giving my best is what I can control, and that it has to be enough. I think that’s a realisation most founders arrive at eventually.

Professionally, our Series A fundraise is the biggest mountain we’ve climbed so far. The momentum gathered when we were reaching investors who shared our long-term vision. Joe’s commercial rigour and Sam’s technical depth were pivotal in building their confidence. Together, they could articulate both the technology’s potential and our ability as a team to realise it.

Yes, and I say that with confidence rather than optimism. We’re not in the business of creating demand for dry coating – that demand has existed for years. Cell manufacturers have long understood the limitations of wet slurry processing: the energy intensity, the toxic solvents, the enormous physical footprint. What they’ve lacked is a reliable, scalable solution for making dry coating work at high throughput and yeild. That’s exactly what we’ve developed.

Wet coating has reached its limits. The industry doesn’t need another incremental improvement on a decades-old process, it needs a step-change, and that’s precisely what DCP® enables.