Canatu carbon nanotubes (CNT) film. Source | Canatu Plc

Canatu Plc (Vantaa, Finland) has signed a 1-year joint development agreement with Denso Corp. (Tokyo, Japan), a supplier of automotive technology and components, to improve the performance of Canatu’s carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Denso is one of Canatu’s largest shareholders.

Canatu is fast-growing, creating advanced CNTs, CNT products and CNT reactors for the semiconductor, automotive and medical diagnostics industries. The company sees that the joint development program has significant potential for future commercialization opportunities of its CNT technology. Such opportunities depend, however, on the outcome of the joint development program and would only be expected to be realized over a longer period of time.

This joint development agreement builds on an earlier memorandum of understanding announced in December 2024. It further strengthens the parties’ long-standing collaboration to improve CNT performance, develop high-performance reactors and advance practical applications for CNT technology, such as ADAS camera and full windshield heaters. The purpose of this joint development agreement is to optimize the sheet resistance to transmittance ratio of CNTs. By improving this ratio, Canatu and Denso aim to achieve high electrical conductivity while maintaining optimal light transmittance, thereby enhancing performance in current applications and expanding the potential use cases of CNTs to new ones such as solar cells.

“We are excited about this collaboration to improve CNT performance and contribute to sustainable mobility with Denso,” Juha Kokkonen, CEO of Canatu Plc., says. “This strengthens our position in developing future-proof solutions for the automotive industry with our partners, and is a key step in our automotive strategy, developing ADAS camera heaters and exploring new high-value applications for advanced CNTs.”