Business View Magazine | April/May 2022

55 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 4 e-Z INC “Before founding e-Zinc, Dr. Zhang worked at Teck Resources as Manager of R&D for 20 years. Owning one of the world’s largest zinc mines, the company tasked him with identifying opportunities in the energy storage sector that could create demand for the metal. Having worked with zinc for over two decades – he even wrote the world’s only book on the subject matter – he realized that zinc has an incredible set of characteristics to be an energy carrier.” At the time, zinc-based batteries were designed as another short duration system, like lithium- ion or lead-acid. However, Dr. Zhang figured out a way to store energy in physically-free zinc metal, unlocking the ability for economically viable long-duration storage. This discovery was the impetus to start e-Zinc, which Dr. Zhang founded and led for the first five years, culminating in the completion of its first successful laboratory demonstration of the functionality and electrochemistry of the technology. The next step in e-Zinc’s journey was to start commercializing the technology, and this required an expanded executive team that would lead fundraising efforts. “I was hired as the new CEO to lead the commercialization of the technology, and our first order of business was raising money,” Larsen shares. “We closed a $3.5 million seed round in 2019, and we were also very fortunate to win a string of competitions and grants totaling about $7 million.” The company’s two notable wins were Breakthrough Energy Solutions Canada, backed by Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and a global solicitation for non-lithium battery technologies by the California Energy Commission. Besides these wins, e-Zinc has attracted an A-list list of investors, including Toyota Ventures and Italy’s Eni, alongside lead investor, US-based Anzu Partners. “The investors we have are a dream syndicate,” notes Larsen. “Our partnership with Toyota gives us access to their manufacturing and supply chain expertise while Eni will give us strategic downstream capabilities as we deploy our technology.” With so many investors lining up to hand James Larsen, CEO of e-Zinc