Beyond Rare Earths: Ionic Mineral Technologies Bags $29M to Revolutionize U.S. Battery Supply Chains for EVs and Defense

Startup Ionic Mineral Technologies just raised $29 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing round. The vertically integrated U.S. producer of advanced materials for the energy, defense and technology sectors said it beat the $25 million funding goal, confirming optimism in its game plan to establish a secure, domestic pipeline for critical battery components. Climate Capital and SAIC Capital are listed as investors.

The Provo, Utah company is already producing complex battery materials at its 74,000 square-foot facility, located at the southern tip of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area. The cash infusion will allow it to speed up production of two flagship products: 

1. Ionisil: a nanosilicon anode material used in electric vehicles and defense batteries

2. IonAL: a high purity boehmite alumina used in battery separators and advanced technical ceramics 

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Ionisil is scheduled to reach the market in early 2026. Ionic hopes the rollout will produce nanosilicon electric batteries 24 times more efficient than older tech that holds lithium ions in graphite. The company says producing this refined silicon can be expensive, costly and dangerous, yielding toxic gases. It intends to overcome these limitations by extracting naturally occurring nanosilicon in Eureka, Utah deposits of the mineral halloysite.

This rare material is being processed at the Provo facility, using proprietary, low carbon and inexpensive methods. The company owns significant claims to a once-abandoned mine in Eureka, Utah. It hopes that local sourcing will "reduce reliance capital efficiency, reduce reliance on foreign supply chains, and align with U.S. industrial and national security priorities."

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Ionic claims resources of 2.4 million tons of halloysite on the property, with a potential yield of about 500,000 tons of nanosilicon. 

Successful production will further two long-term goals for the EV industry and the nation. First, Chief Technical Officer Sunho Kang says it will disrupt a long-standing trade-off, in which higher energy density Li-ion batteries take longer to charge. Second, China now exports nearly all graphite used in American EVs while nanosilicon technology will source all materials locally.

"There is energy density and there is power density," Kang continues. "Energy decides driving distance. Power decides charging speed. Typically, we can't have both, meaning we give up some driving distance to reduce charging time or vice versa. By adding silicon to the cell, we can actually have both."

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Other benefits of this technology will please environmentally minded EV owners. Independent sustainability consultancy Minviro tested ionisil production last year and found it emitted up to 90% less carbon than natural graphite, and up to 93% less than synthetic graphite. Ionic adds that byproducts of the refining process "are not only nontoxic but useful – medicinal magnesium oxide and efficiency-boosting high-purity alumina." 

In addition, halloysite is mined at the surface, instead of deep mining, and disturbed land and flora can be replanted with nothing artificial left behind.  

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