Achates Power Refuels with $35M for Cleaner, Fuel-Efficient Engine

Achates Power, Engines, Cleantech

San Diego’s Achates Power says today it has raised $35.2 million in a Series C round of venture financing to advance its opposed-piston engine, saying its cleaner and more fuel-efficient design is gaining traction throughout the automotive industry.

Although details about the company’s work with automakers remains under wraps, Achates CEO David Johnson says the company’s engine could enable the industry to meet strict new U.S. standards that require an automaker’s fleet of passenger vehicles to average 54.5 mpg by 2025. While there are many ways for automakers to meet the fleet standard, including electric and hybrid electric vehicles, Johnson said Achates’ technology “will enable us as an industry to meet those goals more economically than anything else.”

In a statement today, Achates Power said existing investors Sequoia Capital Partners, RockPort Capital Partners, Madrone Capital Partners, InterWest Partners, and Triangle Peak Partners participated in the latest founding round. Including the latest round, Achates said it has raised a total of nearly $90 million since the company was founded in 2004 by James Lemke, an adjunct engineering professor at UC San Diego,

“The engine business is not a fly-by-night operation,” Johnson said in a phone interview this morning. “We’re very pleased that our investors continue to support us.” The cumulative total, he added, represents “a substantial commitment over a long period of time that’s necessary to bring this better engine to market at this time.”

The company has applied advanced materials and manufacturing techniques, multi-injector technology, and other engineering advances to re-engineer the opposed-piston, two-stroke engine. Achates says its design weighs about a third less than a conventional engine, requires less machining and assembly, and is less expensive and easier to manufacture.

After developing and demonstrating the advantages of its design over the past nine years, Johnson said the company is moving into much more of a structural commercialization phase, in which Achates is working closely with customers to

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.