Urban mining startup Metastable Materials raises pre-seed financing

Bengaluru-based urban mining startup Metastable Materials has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from a clutch of angels and venture capital firms.

The round was led by Akshay Singhal and Kartik Hajela, co-founders of Log9 Materials, an advanced EV battery technology company.

Archana Priyadarshini, General Partner, PointOne also co-led the round, with participation from Sanjiv Rangrass (ex-Group Head at ITC), among other angels.

Metastable Materials will utilize the capital to build India’s 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 money will be used for team, operations and infrastructure expansion. 

Shubham Vishvakarma, founder, Metastable Materials, said: “We at Metastable are pioneering a first-of-its-kind, chemical-free technology and system that in an ecofriendly manner can extract a wide range of recycled materials from Lithium-ion batteries. This will provide a sustainable alternative to freshly mined metals and with the end-goal of integrating with existing global supply chains.”

Since its inception in October 2021, Metastable Materials has been working on providing environment-friendly solutions by adapting the ‘waste-as-ore’ approach for reducing the lithium-iron batteries’ overall life-cycle cost and giving impetus to circular economy.

Its tech can efficiently 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 its flagship metals extraction process and will be acquiring more patents soon. 

Kartik Hajela, co-founder, Log9 Materials, said, “Urban mining will not only help in reducing the burden for newly mined materials from earth-like Lithium 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.”