Ilika Plc (LON:IKA) Chief Executive Officer Graeme Purdy caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the £1.25 million grant from the Advanced Propulsion Centre’s ‘Demonstrate’ fund to support Goliath A-Sample production in a 12-month PRIMED programme with HSSMI and UKBIC.
Q1: Over the weekend the Government announced the £2.5 billion Drive35 programme as part of its industrial strategy, and Ilika appears to be one of the first beneficiaries. What are the headlines of the group’s grant award?
A: What we saw over the weekend is the Government implementing its industrial strategy, which it outlined as long ago as the Autumn Statement in 2024 and its announced a new programme called Drive35, which is all about deploying £2.5 billion of funding over the next ten years to support the automotive transition to EVs.
Ilika has been awarded a grant in the first tranche of deployment of funds as part of that Drive35 programme. The project we’re on is called PRIMED and we’re delivering it in collaboration with HSSMI and the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC). The total collaboration programme is £3 million over 12 months, and the group will receive £1.25 million in grant funding.
Q2: Why should investors welcome this grant award, do you think?
A2: Investors like Ilika to receive these grants because it’s non-dilutive funding. We fund our R&D out of shareholder equity, and when we can secure grant funding like this, it avoids us having to go back to the market and ask shareholders to provide that funding.
So, it’s really a fantastic leverage of our shareholder equity.
Q3: Now, you mentioned earlier the duration of the grant is only 12 months. Do you expect that you will be able to secure further support down the line?
A3: Yes. In fact, hard on the heels of this announcement, the government agencies involved, Innovate UK and the Advanced Propulsion Centre, have started a series of different competitions for additional funding to be spent over the coming year or so.
Ilika is reviewing these closely, and we have some kick-off meetings later this week. We’re very enthusiastic about the opportunity to secure additional grant funding and further leverage to support our programmes.
Q4: In the press release, you mentioned working with UKBIC. Like you say, you’ve done previous work with them. Why is this such an important partnership?
A4: Courtesy of the British taxpayer, there is a lot of very high-quality, manufacturing-ready equipment at UKBIC which we can use to demonstrate that our process works at an industrially relevant scale, without us having to invest just for the sake of scale-up. Our model is asset-light, we don’t aim to build a gigafactory ourselves. Instead, we work with manufacturing partners, just as we’re working with Cirtec on the Stereax side of the business to find the right commercial relationship for Goliath. Demonstrating our processes on UKBIC’s large-scale equipment gives potential licensees confidence.
Q5: What can investors look forward to next from the Goliath programme?
A5: At present, we’re testing our 10Ah power prototypes, what we call our P1.5s, which sit between the P1s we issued for evaluation last year and the P2s we’ll release towards the end of this year. Once we have sufficient data, we’ll release these to customers for independent evaluation. They’re of a size that allows potential pack builders and OEMs to start making design decisions, so that will be a key validation milestone for us.
