Battery recycling heats up with Ascend Elements’ $542M series D
Reading Time: 2 minutesVenture funding for battery recycling startups is popping off lately, and the latest to see the IRA-driven upside is Ascend Elements, which announced a massive $542 million in series D funding on top of $480 million in earlier DoE grants.
The eight-year-old company recycles lithium batteries into black mass and produces cathode active materials (CAM) and precursor cathode active materials (PCAM). It’s putting those hundreds of millions in recent funding into a manufacturing facility in Kentucky, where it aims to refine black mass into sustainable, battery-ready materials.
BlackRock-linked Decarbonization Partners led Ascend Elements’ D round. Some other big names also chipped in, including funds managed by Singapore and Qatar, as well as climate-tech investor Fifth Wall. Though BlackRock markets itself as a environmentally conscious investor, the firm still pumps loads of cash into the fossil fuels industry.
Battery-recycling boom
In the U.S. in particular, VCs are handing over a whole mess of money to companies that ultimately play a role in turning spent batteries into new ones. Other deals this year, besides Ascend Elements’ $542 million, include: Redwood Materials’ $1 billion D round, Nth Cycle’s targeted $50 million series B and Green Li-ion’s $20.5 million ‘pre-Series B.’ That’s on top of a $192 million effort from the Energy Department to back battery recycling tech in the U.S., with the goal of limiting U.S. dependence on batteries produced in China.
The recent influx of deals calls to mind the climate-tech funding frenzy of 2021, but according to PitchBook data, global VC funding for battery-recycling firms is still a ways from its peak a couple years back. In Q3 2021, PitchBook tracked $2.5 billion in funding across nine deals. In the same quarter this year (with a few weeks remaining), the data firm recorded $1.5 billion in funding across seven deals.
Ref: techcrunch
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