# Holyvolt Raised $45 Million to Build Batteries Without Nickel or Cobalt, Betting It Can Undercut China's Grip on the Supply Chain > Stockholm-based Holyvolt has raised $45 million at a $245 million valuation to commercialize a nickel and cobalt free battery cathode chemistry, using AI trained on hundreds of thousands of test cells to speed up its lab work as it races to loosen China's hold on battery supply chains. - Source: Continental - Canonical URL: https://continental.today/article/holyvolt-raised-45-million-to-build-batteries-without-nickel-or-cobalt-betting-it-can-undercut-china-s-grip-on-the-supply-chain - Author: staff - Section: Business - Published: 2026-10-15T20:42:04.986Z - Updated: 2026-10-15T20:42:04.986Z - Tags: Holyvolt, Battery Technology, Startups, Supply Chains --- 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. The strategic backdrop is hard to ignore. China currently controls about 85% of global cathode active material production and roughly 80% of battery cell manufacturing worldwide, leaving Western automakers, defense contractors, and data center operators dependent on a supply chain that runs through a single country. That dependence is becoming a legal problem as well as a commercial one: a Pentagon ban on purchasing batteries from five named Chinese manufacturers is set to take effect on October 1, 2027. Holyvolt is aiming to have its cathode material ready for commercial use by 2027, starting with drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles before expanding into electric vehicles and data center power storage, markets where buyers are increasingly willing to pay a premium for batteries that do not depend on Chinese supply chains. --- Originally published by Continental. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://continental.today/article/holyvolt-raised-45-million-to-build-batteries-without-nickel-or-cobalt-betting-it-can-undercut-china-s-grip-on-the-supply-chain.