Renewable Metals raises $12 million in Series A

Australian startup Renewable Metals has closed a USD 12 million Series A funding round to accelerate the commercial deployment of its next-generation lithium-ion battery recycling technology.

The round was oversubscribed and upsized from an initial USD 8 million target, bringing total funding secured to over USD 38 million since inception. This includes support from the Australian and UK governments. The raise was led by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), managed by Virescent Ventures, and supported by existing investors the Neglected Climate Opportunities, European Metal Recycling (EMR), and Investible alongside new investor Climate Tech Partners, according to a press release.

Renewable Metals is developing a locally deployable solution to recover critical minerals within domestic or regional supply chains, reducing reliance on exporting battery waste and offshore refining.

The company has developed a differentiated alkali-based hydrometallurgical process that recovers lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and manganese from end-of-life lithium-ion batteries. The process achieves >95% recovery, including up to 30% more lithium than conventional acid-based methods, at lower cost and with reduced environmental impact, the press release said.

“Our process changes the economics of battery recycling. By delivering high recovery at low cost without large, centralised facilities, we can build plants sized for near term feedstock, and scale with the market over time,” Luan Atkinson, CEO of Renewable Metals, said. “This avoids capital intensive overbuild while enabling a distributed network close to feedstock sources globally, reducing the cost and complexity of transporting hazardous materials.”

“Processing NMC and LFP together has been the unsolved problem in battery recycling. Conventional approaches require separate lines for each chemistry, duplicating capital and operating costs and limiting flexibility as the market evolves,” Blair Pritchard, Partner at Virescent Ventures, said. “Renewable Metals has solved for that. Their single-line process handles both chemistries together, which is technically non-trivial and commercially significant as LFP’s share of the market continues to grow. Combined with a low-capital modular plant design, the company’s platform is genuinely deployable at scale.”