Battery recycling heats up with Ascend Elements' $542M Series D
Summary
Venture 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). Its 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. Though BlackRock markets itself as an environmentally conscious investor, the firm still pumps loads of cash into the fossil fuels industry.Recycling batteries [into black mass], quite frankly, is on the easy side, Ascend Elements CEO Mike OKronley said on Monday in a call with TechCrunch. Whats challenging is to make the really high-value, battery-grade materials on the output side.Ascend Elements tells TechCrunch that it already does this work out of pilot facilities in Massachusetts and Michigan. The company aims to churn out a lot more battery-ready materials (20 kilotons of PCAM per year) at its Kentucky plant, after it kicks off operations there around the end of 2024.