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Commercial
Chicago

Shapack lands NanoGraf manufacturing in West Loop

Battery tech company will occupy 17,000 square feet downtown

NanoGraf's Dr. Kurt Breitenkamp with rendering of 400 North Noble Street (NanoGraf, The Bishop 400 Noble, Getty)
NanoGraf's Dr. Kurt Breitenkamp with rendering of 400 North Noble Street (NanoGraf, The Bishop 400 Noble, Getty)

A battery technology company that was cast out of Northwestern University’s research lab is opening a permanent factory in Chicago’s West Loop, and handing Fulton Market pioneer Jeff Shapack a new tenant.

NanoGraf, which won a $10 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense to supply lithium-ion components for equipment like radios and night-vision goggles, leased a 17,000-square-foot facility at 400 North Noble Street, west of Fulton Market, Crain’s reported. The company’s move will allow it to double the size of its staff to about 35 people.

It also enables the company to relocate its manufacturing enterprise from Japan, where it’s been making products since 2018. With the new US facility, NanoGraf said it expects to triple production to about 35 tons of the anode material it makes next year. That’s enough for annual production of 20 million rechargeable battery cells that are about the size of an AA battery.

Shapack bought the space included in the property — which is a 1.5-acre warehouse — for $6.5 million as he was venturing west with purchases in 2019 while his prominent Fulton Market projects such as 811 West Fulton Market were reshaping Chicago’s office market.

“The reason the Department of Defense wants these cells is they can’t buy them anywhere else,” Jeff Chamberlain, CEO of Volta Energy Technologies, a Warrenville-based venture fund that recently invested in NanoGraf, told the outlet. “As a venture investor, that’s music to your ears. It’s hard to develop a new material. It’s even harder if you want to manufacture it.”

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Commercial space users aside from traditional office occupiers, such as others oriented around manufacturing and laboratory research, have boosted the West Loop as of late.

A 5-year-old nonprofit advanced manufacturing incubator known as mHub is buying a vacant 80,000-square-foot building from Phil Denny’s firm Peppercorn Capital at 240 North Ashland Avenue for more than $32 million. The organization will relocate from River West.

Its goal is to serve as a launching pad for new businesses that want to grow in Chicago by helping to limit the costs and other barriers they face with physical product innovation and production for companies in early stages with manufacturing needs.

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— Victoria Pruitt

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Fulton MarketLife ScienceWest Loop