Holyvolt acquires US battery innovator Wildcat Discovery for $73 million.

      The battery industry faces a translation challenge. While researchers can discover new promising materials in the lab, the real difficulty lies in progressing those discoveries through chemistry, engineering, and manufacturing without losing significant time and money. The gap between discovery and production has historically been a major bottleneck in the clean energy transition.

      Holyvolt, a Swedish battery technology startup established in 2022, believes it has a solution. On Thursday, the Volvo-backed company announced it has acquired Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego-based specialist in battery materials, in a $73 million deal comprising cash, equity, and deferred milestone payments.

      This acquisition combines two technologies that have evolved in parallel for years: Holyvolt’s water-based manufacturing and screen-printing process, and Wildcat’s High Throughput Platform (HTP), which can synthesize and screen thousands of material combinations at once.

      Holyvolt's CEO Mathias Ingvarsson mentioned in an interview with Impact Loop that the company had previously been a client of Wildcat before deciding to acquire them. “Today, Wildcat is the undisputed global leader in battery chemistry,” he stated. “For 18 years, they have concentrated on battery chemistry and achieved leadership in anodes, cathodes, electrolytes, and everything related to batteries.”

      At its essence, Wildcat’s HTP serves as a materials discovery engine, conducting combinatorial experiments simultaneously, a method initially developed for pharmaceutical drug discovery. It can discover optimal battery chemistries up to ten times faster than traditional research methods. Importantly, the platform produces terabyte-scale, structured materials datasets, which are essential for machine learning models to be truly effective rather than just visually appealing.

      Holyvolt contributes to the manufacturing side by replacing organic solvents in conventional battery electrode coating with a water-based process and employing screen-printing techniques honed over 20 years of research. This methodology is intended to be flexible, modular, and scalable—critical aspects when transitioning from pilot-scale production to commercial volumes without reconstructing the factory.

      Together, the two companies outline a pipeline that extends from molecular discovery to pilot-scale production. The combined organization will function from offices located in Stockholm, Munich, and San Diego, delivering services across the battery supply chain through technology development partnerships and licensing agreements.

      This acquisition comes after Holyvolt’s €20 million funding round, which was specifically aimed at financing this deal. Ingvarsson noted that the company raised about €12 million at a €182 million valuation in February, following an earlier round of approximately €5.5 million. Investors include Volvo, climate tech venture capital firm Course Corrected, and FAM, the investment arm of Sweden’s Wallenberg family.

      Wildcat’s platform has roots in the work of Prof. Peter Schultz, the company’s founder and a chemistry professor at Scripps Research in San Diego. Schultz is renowned for his pioneering contributions to combinatorial chemistry, a method for conducting numerous parallel experiments to discover promising compounds, which revolutionized drug discovery in the 1990s and 2000s. He founded Symyx Technologies to apply this approach to materials science and later established Wildcat to focus on battery technology.

      “With Holyvolt, we can achieve for batteries what high throughput and AI accomplished for drug discovery,” Schultz remarked.

      Schultz's credentials are impressive: he holds the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received many other esteemed scientific awards.

      The critical question remains whether the combinatorial chemistry techniques Schultz developed can be effectively applied to battery materials at the scale and speed Holyvolt envisions, and whether the newly formed entity can successfully convert this compelling technology stack into commercial contracts. The forthcoming years will provide clarity on these points.