Analysis
Holyvolt, a Stockholm-based battery-materials startup, raised $45 million in all-equity funding from Fifth Wall, Zone II, CC.VC and a group of angel investors from the defense and finance industries, valuing the company at $245 million, Fortune reported, citing a person familiar with the round. The company is developing DRX, or disordered rocksalt, cathode chemistry that uses neither nickel nor cobalt, which it says can deliver NMC-like performance at roughly LFP cost once produced in North America.
CEO Mathias Ingvarsson, a Swede who previously ran Tempur-Pedic's European business through its NYSE listing, co-leads the company with COO Steven Prast, a former Tesla manufacturing leader who grew up in a Michigan auto-industry family. Holyvolt plans to start commercializing DRX in 2027, beginning with drones before moving into mobility and data-center formulations for automakers. Earlier this year it merged with Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego lab founded by Scripps chemist Peter Schultz, in a deal reported at $73 million; Wildcat's high-throughput screening platform has supported more than 225 projects for over 85 customers, including BMW, and has tested more than 500,000 cells.
“Holyvolt plans to start commercializing DRX in 2027, beginning with drones before moving into mobility and data-center formulations for automakers.”
The round is aimed squarely at a supply-chain problem: China controls roughly 85% of the world's cathode active material and about 80% of battery-cell production, and a provision in the fiscal 2024 defense authorization act bars the Pentagon from buying batteries from CATL, BYD and four other named Chinese manufacturers starting October 2027. That deadline gives Holyvolt and comparable North American battery-materials startups, including anode specialist Sila Nanotechnologies and cell-maker Our Next Energy, a government-mandated customer base that doesn't depend on winning on cost alone.
The counterweight is that DRX remains unproven at commercial scale. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) chemistries dominate today's batteries precisely because they've been manufactured at volume for over a decade; Holyvolt's 2027 commercialization target compresses a chemistry-to-factory timeline that has tripped up well-funded battery-materials startups before. A $245 million valuation on $45 million raised also implies investors are pricing in that Holyvolt clears both the technical scale-up and the defense-procurement opportunity, not just one of them.
