Holyvolt, a Stockholm-based battery materials startup, has raised $45 million in an equity round that values the company at $245 million after the raise. The round drew backing from Fifth Wall, Zone II, and CC.VC, along with angel investors from the defense and finance industries. The company is led by Mathias Ingvarsson, a Swedish founder and chief executive who previously ran Tempur-Pedic's international expansion and European operations after that company went public, alongside chief operating officer Steven Prast, a former Tesla manufacturing executive from northern Michigan with an auto industry family background.
Holyvolt's pitch centers on a cathode chemistry known as DRX, short for disordered rocksalt, which avoids both nickel and cobalt, two materials whose supply chains run heavily through China and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The company says DRX can match the performance of nickel-based cathodes while costing roughly what cheaper lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, batteries cost today, using a supply chain built entirely in the West.
To get there faster, Holyvolt leaned on a March 2026 merger with Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego-based battery materials lab, in a deal worth $73 million. That merger gave Holyvolt access to Wildcat's archive of more than 225 battery projects and over 500,000 tested cells, which the company used to train machine learning models that predict how new cathode formulations will perform. Those predictions guide which formulations get tested in the lab, and the lab results in turn refine the models, a loop Holyvolt says lets it run research about ten times faster than conventional battery development.