Oxeco secures $10.5 million to advance surface treatment products in clean energy, transport sectors

Oxeco (Oxford, U.K.), parent company to Oxford Advanced Surfaces (OAS, Kidlington,​​ U.K.) has announced the closing of a $10.5 million funding round secured by new chief executive officer (CEO), Vassilis Ragoussis, to further commercialize the company’s proprietary technology platform, Onto, and advance R&D across the clean technology and transport sectors. The funding round was led by Lansdowne Partners, with participation from Ora Capital Partners, Tanarra Capital and the Goh family office. 

“As demand for industrial production surpasses pre-pandemic levels and net-zero deadlines loom, urgent action is needed to accelerate new product innovation whilst optimizing productivity at scale,” Ragoussis says. “This investment will expedite our ability to support partners in bringing highly innovative clean energy products to market and address workforce shortages, supply chain challenges and soaring energy costs.”

Maintaining a focus on applications in high-performance plastics and composite manufacturing, Onto is said to improve the way materials interact in their intended environment by leveraging reactive carbenes to control the adhesion and wetting properties of surfaces. The technology optimizes the surface treatment of painted products and enables designers to modify the surface of materials to develop novel products, Oxeco says. Today, manufacturers and designers are exploring applications in clean energy components including wind turbine blades and batteries.

One of the company’s partners, a leading producer of finished composite parts, has been using Oxeco’s technology to solve bottlenecks in the painting of automotive parts for Fortune 500 companies and to maximize an existing workforce and space.

“Oxeco eliminated the need for a cumbersome sanding process prior to painting parts for Mercedes-Benz trucks and Ford vehicles,” Anthony Gallia, chairman of Polkima (İzmir, Turkey), says. “By integrating Oxeco’s Onto into our process, we eliminated the aesthetic and functional risk of pinholes in our products, created a cleaner and healthier environment for our workforce and significantly increased production without expanding our floor space or headcount.”