Holyvolt Raises $45M to Build Batteries China Can’t Copy

A Stockholm startup is betting $45 million that the United States and Europe will never catch China by copying its playbook. Holyvolt, a battery-materials developer, closed an all-equity funding round valuing the company at $245 million to commercialize cathode chemistries that bypass Chinese supply chains entirely.

The capital came from Fifth Wall, Zone II, CC.VC, and a group of angel investors drawn from the defense and finance sectors. The money will fund the deployment of disordered rocksalt, or DRX, a family of cathode materials engineered without nickel or cobalt.

China currently manufactures roughly 80% of the world’s battery cells and controls about 85% of global cathode active material production. That dominance rests on two mature chemistries: lithium iron phosphate, known as LFP, and nickel manganese cobalt, or NMC. Western governments have responded with billions in subsidies aimed at building domestic gigafactories to produce those exact same cell types. Steven Prast, Holyvolt’s chief operating officer and a former Tesla manufacturing leader, views that approach as a structural dead end.

Prast argues that lithium-ion technology has completed only 10% to 20% of its total maturity curve. The remaining innovation, he contends, will come from materials science rather than incremental manufacturing scale. Attempting to replicate China’s mastery of LFP production ignores two decades of entrenched industrial infrastructure and state-backed cost advantages that Western firms cannot realistically match.

The technical barrier separating batteries from semiconductors explains why energy storage has not followed the predictable miniaturization trajectory of computer chips. Moore’s Law relies on physics, a discipline where computational modeling can reliably predict outcomes before fabrication begins. Battery performance depends on electrochemistry, a field governed by complex molecular interactions that still resist purely digital simulation.

That distinction shapes how Holyvolt operates. While much of the artificial intelligence sector pursues fully computational drug and materials discovery, Holyvolt requires physical validation for every algorithmic prediction. The company anchors this approach in a March merger with Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego laboratory acquired for $73 million.

Founded by Scripps Research chemist Peter Schultz, Wildcat spent 18 years building a high-throughput testing platform capable of evaluating thousands of material combinations simultaneously. The lab has executed more than 225 projects for over 85 clients, including BMW, and physically tested more than 500,000 cells. Holyvolt CEO Mathias Ingvarsson structured the merged entity around this dataset, training AI models on historical results and feeding predictions back into the physical lab for continuous refinement. Ingvarsson previously led the European operations and international expansion of Tempur-Pedic through its New York Stock Exchange listing.

Most AI-driven science ventures build models first and hunt for training data later. Holyvolt reversed the sequence, leveraging nearly two decades of empirical reinforcement learning. Internal case studies indicate the integrated lab operates ten times faster than conventional battery research and development cycles.

DRX represents the first commercial output of that accelerated loop. Performance data presented at the International Battery Conference in March 2026 demonstrated energy density comparable to NMC cells while targeting landed costs in North America similar to LFP. Crucially, the supply chain for DRX raw materials avoids reliance on Chinese processing networks, though Prast declined to name specific suppliers.

The push toward alternative chemistries carries immediate regulatory urgency. Section 154 of the fiscal 2024 National Defense Authorization Act prohibits the Pentagon from procuring batteries manufactured by six Chinese entities, including CATL and BYD. The ban takes effect Oct. 1, 2027, colliding directly with the U.S. military’s rapid expansion of drone fleets and autonomous systems that require reliable, domestically sourced power cells.

Holyvolt plans to begin commercializing DRX in 2027, targeting unmanned aerial vehicles first. Parallel formulations are in development for passenger electric vehicles and data centers, where the explosive power draw from GPU clusters demands specialized energy storage architectures distinct from standard automotive packs.

The company does not intend to construct its own manufacturing plants. Scaling from laboratory synthesis to gigawatt-hour production remains the most capital-intensive phase of battery commercialization, a hurdle that has bankrupted multiple well-funded Western startups over the past decade. Instead, Holyvolt will pursue licensing agreements, toll manufacturing contracts, and joint ventures with established industrial partners.

Ingvarsson, who noted that Volvo Cars is now majority-owned by China’s Geely, framed the strategy as a matter of systemic stability rather than geopolitical hostility. Concentration of critical energy infrastructure in a single region creates vulnerabilities that transcend trade disputes.

The $45 million equity round provides the runway to bridge the gap between laboratory validation and the October 2027 defense procurement deadline.