We are excited to announce that we have concluded a deal with Imagine Intelligent Materials for the acquisition by Ionic of all Imagine Assets, including plant and equipment, IP and commercial relationships. With this acquisition, Ionic is positioned to become an Australian graphene powerhouse, with a portfolio of advanced nano-technologies covering energy storage and sensing applications.  Ionic has paid approximately $600,000 cash and 30,000,000 Ionic shares to secure the deal.

The acquisition represents a real win-win solution for the companies whose technologies share many synergies that will be leveraged to create much greater value than either company could achieve alone.  The Imagine assets include:

• 20 granted patents (four patent families) and 31 additional national phase patents filed (12 patent families)
• Industrial-scale plant and equipment for the 3-stage production of few-layer graphene materials
• Commercial demonstration plant and equipment for three graphene sensing applications, including smart flooring, geo-textiles and smart conveyor belts
• A range of laboratory equipment and bench-scale production technologies that will be well-suited to Ionic’s newly established commercial labs.

With these newly acquired assets added to our existing portfolio of technologies and new Mt Waverley manufacturing facility, Ionic is now in a position to take on world markets with our graphene technologies.  The Imgne X3 graphene products are perfectly suited to conductive coatings and sensing applications which complements Ionic’s existing experience and knowledge in supercapacitors and energy storage applications, which leverage many of the same properties of graphene.  With these integrated technologies, Ionic will become a world leader in graphene sensing and energy storage.  Ionic’s key areas of focus will now be:

• Graphene supercapacitors driving next-generation energy and power systems, bolstering battery capabilities and enabling miniaturisation of advanced electronics and communications devices;
• Hybrid energy storage technologies, leveraging the benefits of both batteries and supercapacitors to meet the energy demands of the future that will be impossible with existing battery technologies;
• Sensing fabrics and textiles for use in smart industrial applications, construction and civil engineering projects.  Detecting structural flaws, moisture, stresses and other physical attributes has the potential to realise a truly connected world where extraordinary volumes of data can be used to guide decision-making and create efficiencies that will be critical to the evolution of our built environment.

At the same time as we have concluded this deal, we have the pleasure of announcing the addition to our team of Dr Phil Aitchison.  Following many years at the forefront of supercapacitor development with Cap-XX in the 2000s and early 2010s, Dr Aitchison moved on to apply his in-depth understanding of materials technology to graphene materials with Imagine.  His part-time work with Ionic over the past 12 months has been an important addition to our team and it is perfectly fitting that he now joins the Ionic team full time to work on our graphene and supercapacitor technologies.

Lastly, we will shortly move into our new Mt Waverly facility which will include:

• Pilot-scale production of our XP graphene product for supercapacitor and energy storage applications
• Pilot coating lines for supercapacitor and energy storage device prototyping and process engineering
• Commercial-scale production of the X3 graphene materials for sensing applications
• 2 commercial laboratories set up to accelerate the translation of university born technologies into real-world manufacturing environs

All in all, we have started 2022 with an enormously positive momentum and we look forward to the culmination of many years working behind the scenes to develop our technologies to a point where they are ready to make a real impact in global markets for graphene technologies.  This will lead to our next commercial goals in a listing targeted for later in 2022 and associated capital raising to support the development of commercial partnerships for commercialisation of our technologies, upscaled manufacturing and ongoing development and iteration of our technologies.