Israel’s Carrar to raise $18m for EV battery production line around Sderot frontline
The Israeli automotive startup plans to double its workforce and create its first plant near Sderot to produce EV battery packs with a cooling system to tackle heat dissipation
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel.
Israeli automotive startup Carrar, based in an industrial park around the city of Sderot, near the border with Gaza, is looking to raise $18 million in capital from investors to build the first production line for its battery-cooling technology for electric vehicles (EVs) and double its workforce.
Carrar last raised $5.3 million in April 2024, six months after the startup had to evacuate its headquarters as Hamas terrorists fired a rocket-propelled grenade that damaged part of its office building. About two weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught, the startup returned to the office, and continued to work with most of its employees and founders from Sderot or surrounding southern communities, amid constant rocket fire. Many employees were evacuated, and others were called up on reserve duty.
With the fresh funding, Carrar seeks to double its workforce from around 25 employees to about 50 over the next two years and tap pools of engineers in the south of Israel rather than traditional tech hubs such as Tel Aviv and Herzliya in central Israel.
Proceeds of the ongoing funding round will be directed to building the startup’s first EV battery system production line. This month, Carrar won a $4.6 million grant from the Israel Innovation Authority, which is part of the ongoing funding round to raise more than $18 million.
Electric cars are a green innovation, and their adoption is a major part of global attempts to tackle the climate crisis, but they come with a problem: their batteries. The challenges revolve around the charging time, lifeline, cost, and safety issues of batteries.
“The performance of the batteries is the key single element defining the performance of electric vehicles,” Carrar CEO Avinoam Rubinstain told The Times of Israel. “Controlling the temperature of batteries is critical to the performance of batteries.”
Rubinstain, a serial entrepreneur, explained that Carrar’s immersion cooling system, which he likened to an air conditioning system, was developed to ensure that the EV battery maintains optimal temperature at all times and doesn’t overheat and catch fire regardless of heat fluctuations caused by climate, ultrafast charging, or car acceleration.
Founded in 2019 by Erez Freibach, Carrar is a developer of battery modules with an internal thermal management system designed for any EV from commercial fleets, buses, and trucks to sports cars and professional race cars. The system, which is integrated into the battery system, dissipates and adjusts heat uniformly across and within the battery cells and prevents overheating during acceleration and high speed or due to external conditions such as a hot climate.
Carrar says that its system keeps the EV battery at the right, stable temperature, thereby consuming less energy and tripling battery lifetime compared to alternative systems that some car manufacturers are using.
Carrar has built battery testing chambers at its facility in the Sapirim industrial park and has partnered with some of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers in the US, Sweden, Germany, Italy, and Japan, including Volvo, Volkswagen, and Hyundai, for pre-development testing.
“With the fresh funding we are going to expand in the Sapirim industrial park and build our first production line in Israel and then we plan to have scalable production lines near our customers, near vehicle manufacturing facilities to be able to deliver products that can go into the vehicles and into drive testing,” said Rubinstain.
To date, the startup has raised about $14 million. Among its main investors are Nasdaq-traded Gentherm, a Northville, Michigan-based maker of thermal management technologies. Other investors include NextGear Ventures and NextLeap Ventures, venture capital fund Salida, and Israeli VC OurCrowd.
