The battery industry has a translation problem. Researchers can identify promising new materials in the laboratory; The challenge is to advance these discoveries through chemistry, engineering and manufacturing without wasting years and hundreds of millions of dollars. The gap between discovery and production has long been one of the key bottlenecks in the clean energy transition.
Holyvolt, a Swedish battery technology company founded in 2022, believes there is a way to solve the problem. On Thursday, the Volvo-backed startup announced the acquisition of Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego-based battery materials specialist, in a $73 million deal made up of a mix of cash, equity and deferred milestone payments.
The transaction brings together two technologies that have been developed in parallel for years: Holyvolt’s screen printing and water-based manufacturing process and Wildcat’s High Throughput Platform (HTP), which can synthesize and screen thousands of material combinations simultaneously.
Mathias Ingvarsson, CEO of Holyvolt, told Impact Loop that the company was already a customer of Wildcat before the acquisition. “Wildcat is now a world leader and undoubtedly the best in battery chemistry,” he said. “They have been focused on battery chemistry for 18 years and are the world leader in anodes, cathodes, electrolytes and virtually everything related to a battery.”
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Wildcat’s HTP is, at its core, a materials discovery engine. It conducts parallel combinatorial experiments, a method originally developed for pharmaceutical drug discovery, and can identify optimal battery chemistries up to ten times faster than traditional research methods. Crucially, the platform generates terabyte-scale structured material data sets as it works: the kind of high-quality, labeled data that machine learning models need to be truly useful and not just decorative.
Holyvolt’s contribution is on the manufacturing side. Its process replaces the organic solvents used in traditional coating of battery electrodes with water-based processing and utilizes screen printing techniques developed over more than 20 years of research. The approach is designed for flexibility, modularity and scalability. These characteristics are extremely important when trying to go from pilot production to commercial production without having to rebuild the factory.
Together, the companies describe a pipeline that extends from molecular discovery to pilot-scale production. The combined company will operate from offices in Stockholm, Munich and San Diego and serve customers across the battery supply chain through both technology development partnerships and licensing agreements.
The acquisition follows Holyvolt’s €20 million financing round, which was specifically designed to finance this deal. According to Ingvarsson, the company raised around €12 million in February at a valuation of €182 million, building on an earlier round of around €5.5 million. Investors include Volvo, climate technology VC Course Corrected and FAM, the investment arm of the Swedish Wallenberg family.
The intellectual legacy of the Wildcat platform dates back to Prof. Peter Schultz, the company’s founder and professor of chemistry at Scripps Research in San Diego. Schultz is one of the world’s leading pioneers of combinatorial chemistry, the technique of conducting large numbers of parallel experiments to identify promising compounds that transformed drug discovery in the 1990s and 2000s. He founded Symyx Technologies to apply the same approach to materials science, and later Wildcat to do the same for batteries.
“With Holyvolt we can do for batteries what high-throughput and AI have done for drug discovery,” said Schultz.
Schultz’s credentials are impressive: He is a recipient of the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received numerous other prestigious scientific awards.
There is no doubt about the importance of the combinatorial chemistry methodology developed by Schultz. Whether the application to battery materials is technically feasible at the scale and speed Holyvolt envisions and whether the combined company can translate a compelling technology stack into commercial contracts is the question that will be resolved over the next few years.
