@FiveCentSYR Syrah received a loan of $150m in Sep 2023 and a...

@FiveCent

SYR Syrah received a loan of $150m in Sep 2023 and a grant of $220m in Oct 2022, from the US Gov. With a current MC of $420m SYR is still considered a small cap (range is $250m to $2B). They are also the only Australian producer of natural graphite at any meaningful scale.

NVX Novonix was also granted $100m in the last round and they're capped at $350m

Alaskan based GPHOF Graphite One received a $37.5m DoD Grant in Jul 2023. They have a market cap of $88m.

STS South Star Battery Metals recently received a $3.2m DoD grant and they are capped at $26m.

All of these technically fall into the "smaller and up and coming companies", including SYR which in it's Dec Quarterly generated $6.3m in revenue, yet had production costs of $19.9m and staff costs of $8.4m. They are currently a loss making operation, finishing at -$22.7m for the quarter in their OPEX.

As per the extract provided by @Louie19, the assessment of the "financial resources of the applicant" doesn't explicitly state anything other than it will be assessed. Maybe the evaluation criteria uses current balance sheet strength to determine eligibility, or maybe it uses it to determine how much financial support a company requires. The only ones who know are the DOE undertaking the assessment and what their specific criteria are.