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The prominent venture capital company Sequoia Capital invests in the Indian battery recycling startup Metastable Materials through its accelerator programme Surge. The funding round in which other venture capital companies and business angels participated, will help the company with expansion and working capital.
Metastable Materials was started in October 2021 based on a method the company called "integrated carbothermal reduction", most likely a pyrolysis process which utilises the graphite and carbon black in the batteries to form lithium carbonate and cobalt powder which later can be separated from the rest of the graphite by using water. The startup started its operation in a 21,000 sq feet facility in Bengaluru where it can process 1,500 tonnes of lithium-ion batteries per year. Most of the feedstock consists of portable batteries.
India has today several smaller and mid-sized lithium-ion battery recyclers of which several are very active in the sourcing of batteries from the West such as Lohum, Attero and Recyclekaru. The South Korean recyclers Sungeel is also present in the Indian market which currently has a pre-processing capacity of 11,500 tonnes between known recyclers.
Read more about Metastable here.