Funding will support the transition to industrial scale and accelerate global deployment.
BGF has joined the oversubscribed $30 million Series A funding round for FluoRok, a company building a novel manufacturing platform for fluorochemicals that bypasses the need for highly hazardous hydrogen fluoride (HF).
After leading FluoRok’s previous funding round in 2024, BGF has now been joined by an expanded syndicate of investors. This includes lead investor Orano Venture Fund/Supernova Invest and Bidra Innovation Ventures, as well as existing investors Oxford Science Enterprises, GGF, Volta Energy Technologies and the University of Oxford, from which FluoRok was spun out.
“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.”
Dr Gabriele Pupo
CEO and Founder of FluoRok
About one in five medicines and one in three agrochemicals on the market contain fluorine, and fluorochemicals are key components of lithium-ion batteries. Despite their importance, conventional fluorochemical manufacturing still relies on a 250-year-old process that depends on HF – one of the most hazardous chemicals in industrial use – and high-purity mined fluorspar (calcium fluoride), a critical raw material sourced from a very limited number of countries, predominantly China.
HF is highly toxic and difficult to handle, meaning that conventional production requires specialised infrastructure, significant capital investment and complex permitting, limiting where new manufacturing capacity can be established.
FluoRok is addressing these constraints with its safer and lower-cost HF-free process that uses mechanical activation rather than acid and high temperatures. The technology 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. This reduces capital and operating costs, enables production closer to end markets, and lessens reliance on a handful of supplying regions.
Dr Gabriele Pupo, CEO and Founder of FluoRok, continued: “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.”
FluoRok’s 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 strong commercial traction with key customers. The funding will support its transition to industrial scale: building demonstrator facilities for its reagents and lithium-ion battery electrolyte salts to prove repeatable manufacturing, expanding the team to support scale-up, validating its products with customers at scale, and broadening commercial partnerships to accelerate global deployment.
