FluoRok, a manufacturing platform for fluorochemicals that bypasses highly hazardous hydrogen fluoride (HF), has raised £22 million in an oversubscribed Series A round. Orano Venture Fund and Supernova Invest co-led the round, alongside Bidra Innovation Ventures, with continued backing from existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises, BGF, GGF, Volta Energy Technologies and the University of Oxford. The equity round also included angel investors, EverQuest Capital Partners, CPI Enterprises, WS Investment, and about £970 thousand in Innovate UK grant funding through its Investor Partnerships programme.
About one in five medicines and one in three agrochemicals on the market contain fluorine, and fluorochemicals are key components of lithium-ion batteries. Conventional fluorochemical manufacturing still relies on a 250-year-old process that depends on HF and high-purity mined fluorspar, a critical raw material sourced from a very limited number of countries, predominantly China. HF is highly toxic and difficult to handle, so conventional production needs specialised infrastructure, significant capital investment and complex permitting, which limits where new manufacturing capacity can be established. FluoRok's process uses mechanical activation rather than acid and high temperatures, runs on off-the-shelf industrial equipment for rapid scale-up, and can use lower-grade mined fluoride or fluoride recovered from industrial waste streams. That reduces capital and operating costs, enables production closer to end markets, and lessens reliance on a handful of supplying regions. Initial markets are inorganic fluorides for pharmaceutical and agrochemical applications, and lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6), the most common electrolyte salt in lithium-ion batteries, with further fluorochemicals to follow.
FluoRok has completed pilot qualifications and gained commercial traction with key customers. The equity round exceeded its original target, building on £10 million raised in previous rounds and more than £10 million in UK and European public funding secured to date. FluoRok was spun out from the University of Oxford.
The funding will support the transition to industrial scale: building demonstrator facilities for reagents and lithium-ion battery electrolyte salts to prove repeatable manufacturing, expanding the team to support scale-up, validating products with customers at scale, and broadening commercial partnerships to accelerate global deployment.
We are thrilled to welcome new investors on our journey to fundamentally change how the world makes fluorochemicals, with safer chemistry and better economics. Closing another oversubscribed round, backed by both new and existing investors from around the world, is a testament to the strength of our technology, the incredible commercial traction and the speed of execution of the FluoRok team. This funding will ensure FluoRok can swiftly move from start-up to scale-up and take a further step towards becoming a large-scale industrial manufacturer.
We back companies whose technologies support a sovereign, sustainable industrial transition. FluoRok has already shown its process works at pilot scale, and taking hydrogen fluoride out of fluorochemical production tackles a safety and supply problem the whole industry shares. We are pleased to join a strong group of investors supporting the team as it moves to industrial scale.
What drew us to FluoRok is that its process isn't tied to one product, but it is a platform with the potential to redefine how fluorochemicals are manufactured and become the new benchmark for the industry. The same chemistry applies to pharmaceutical and agrochemical building blocks, battery materials and inorganic fluorides, which gives the company several routes to commercial scale and a broad base of potential partners. We're pleased to back the team at this stage of its growth.
