Metastable Materials raises pre-seed funding

In its maiden fund-raising round, Bengaluru-based urban mining startup Metastable Materials has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from a clutch of angel investors and venture capital firms. The pre-seed round was led by Akshay Singhal and Kartik Hajela, Co-Founders of Log9 Materials – an advanced EV battery-technology and battery manufacturing company.

Archana Priyadarshini, General Partner, PointOne was also one of the lead investors in the round, which saw the participation of Sanjiv Rangrass (Ex-Group Head at ITC Limited), among other angels. Prior to this fundraise, the startup faced a cash crunch.

Metastable Materials will be utilising the funding to build Lithium-ion battery supply chain infra by extracting the much-needed elements from end-of-life batteries. This will include scaling up Metastable’s patented process and developing corresponding supply chains. In addition, the amount raised will go a long way in team, operations and infrastructure expansion for the future, the company said.

Shubham Vishvakarma, Founder, Metastable Materials said, “We at Metastable are pioneering a first-of-its-kind, chemical-free technology and system that in an eco-friendly manner can extract a wide range of recycled materials from lithium-ion batteries, in order to provide a sustainable alternative to freshly mined metals and with the end-goal of integrating with existing global supply chains. This fundraising will certainly act as a catalyst in augmenting our efforts in the near future.”

Metastable’s technology can extract copper, aluminum, cobalt, nickel, lithium and various other metals out of LiBs while ensuring very high recovery rates of these rare metals. The startup, which is modelling its operations around the concept of urban mining, has already filed four patents related to their flagship metals extraction process, and will be applying for more soon. It is in talks with several suppliers for commercialisation of extracted metals.

Kartik Hajela, Co-Founder, Log9 Materials said, “Urban mining will not only help in reducing the burden for newly-mined materials from the earth like Lithium etc., but can also be an important piece in reducing India's global dependency for raw materials for batteries. Process innovation is very critical to scale urban mining; and to this end, Metastable's proprietary process can help bring scale to this sector sustainably.”

Sanjeev Rangrass said, “Today, sustainability in all spheres has to become the core of every organization and all human beings. Metastable is filling in an important void and that too in a critical area of batteries and EVs.”

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