Ilika PLC (AIM:IKA, OTCQX:ILIKF) this week delivered a trading update that outlined the battery company's continued progress for both its Stereax and Goliath solid-state battery programmes.
The company said it had reached the final stages of preparation for shipping Stereax batteries to its first customers. It highlighted that technical validation had been completed with Cirtec Medical in Massachusetts, and the process qualification phase was finalised in August.
Ilika confirmed that it had since been manufacturing production lots and expected to complete first shipments by year-end, barring any disruption during the festive period.
CEO Graeme Purdy, whilst speaking to Proactive, said there was “a massive amount of excitement at our facility,” noting that quality control was underway and that the commercial team was actively engaged with customers.
Here we take a closer look at the chat.
Graeme Purdy: I thought it would be a great opportunity just to give a quick snapshot. Stereax has seen some fantastic milestones over the last 12 months or so. You know, at the beginning of 2025, we said that we'd completed the technical validation of the equipment commissioning, and we got into qualifying the process with our partners, Cirtec Medical in Lowell, Massachusetts.
That then came to a conclusion in August. And we've been pushing ahead with running a series of manufacturing lots since then. We're pretty close now to shipping products to the first of our lucky customers. So barring any last minute delays, as we enter the US and UK festive period, we expect to be bang on target with that.
Proactive: It's been a long time coming. A lot of work to get to that particular point. How excited are you and the team about getting to this point?
Graeme Purdy: Oh, we're totally stoked. There is a massive amount of excitement at our facility. You know, we're seeing products going through QC, and of course, the business team is in contact with our patient customers. There's a lot of energy in the company right now.
Proactive: Absolutely. Let's turn our attention to Goliath. You've got a pretty nice update on that as well.
Graeme Purdy: Yeah. I mean, Goliath obviously is a separate story running in parallel. So loads of news flow associated with that. The people that follow the company will realise that right at the start of this financial year, back in May, we confirmed that some of our customers had validated the 2Ah P1 prototypes that we'd sent out to OEM and tier-one partners.
We then gratefully received a government grant in July of this year, which was all about supporting the manufacture of Goliath A-sample batteries. Which is what the industry refers to as the first prototypes that they would then do modelling and engineering around for automotive applications. And this allows us to have some great collaboration with Jaguar Land Rover here in the UK, and also to work with the University of Oxford, that's keeping us on the straight and narrow in terms of best practice technical approaches.
And then we are now using the automated pilot line that we spent a lot of the summer completing, which is now enabling the delivery of larger volumes of our prototypes. We've increased the size of prototypes from 2Ah through a factor of five to 10Ah prototypes. And we expect, again, to complete the initiation and delivery of these prototypes to customers by the close of 2025.
Proactive: Okay. I know that you'll have the full update in January with the main numbers, but should people not be looking so much at the numbers, but more about announcements like you just talked about and the importance of those as you head into 2026?
Graeme Purdy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, people who follow the company are much more interested really in the milestones that we've just outlined, that we're able to tick off on that road to commercialization. And then as product revenue starts next year, you can expect a greater degree of interest in how we start ramping up and completing that commercial journey.
Proactive: Yeah. It's going to be an exciting rest of this year and into 2026. Graeme, really appreciate your time. Thanks for updating us on everything. And it sounds like we're going to have a lot more conversations in the next few months for sure.