Funding Friday: Battery Metals Made in the USA

This week has already brought a plethora of funding announcements. As my colleague Alexander C. Kaufman highlighted in our AM newsletter, these include $421 million in debt financing for the geothermal unicorn Fervo and a deal between Uber and Rivian that could see the former investing over $1.2 billion in the electric vehicle automaker to support the deployment of up to 50,000 autonomous robotaxis through 2031.

But beyond these headline-grabbing numbers, this week also brings a major offtake agreement for the Massachusetts-based critical minerals startup Nth Cycle, coinciding with the Trump administration’s $500 million push for domestic refining and recycling. There’s also new money for an AI platform for energy data, lower-carbon concrete, and carbon sequestering textiles.

Nth Cycle Lands $1.1 Billion Offtake Agreement for Key Battery Metals

A wave of critical minerals startups has been gaining momentum in the U.S., buoyed by the Trump administration’s push to onshore production in the name of national security. One of those companies, Nth Cycle, recently signed a $1.1 billion, 10-year binding offtake agreement to supply nickel and lithium to global commodities trader Trafigura. The scale of this deal — Trafigura has committed to buying 2,000 metric tons of nickel and 1,500 metric tons of lithium carbonate — underscores the growing geopolitical attraction of breaking away from the Chinese-dominated battery minerals supply chain.

Nth Cycle recovers metals such as nickel, copper, and cobalt from “black mass” — a processed mixture of materials from spent lithium-ion batteries — by dissolving it in a liquid electrolyte and pumping it through an electrochemical cell. Individually-tuned voltages drive specific metal ions to gain electrons and deposit as solid metals onto the electrode’s surface. Unlike large-scale traditional metal refineries, the startup says its smaller, modular system can be deployed at existing partner sites like recycling facilities or scrap handling locations, reducing the cost of refining by up to 70%.

This deal will support the company’s expansion into South Carolina and the Netherlands, where operations are expected to start in 2028. Nth Cycle first started commercial operations a year and a half ago at a facility in Ohio capable of producing 900 metric tons annually of a mixed-metal material that contains nickel and cobalt.

Halcyon Secures $21 Million Series A to Demystify Energy Data with AI

“Speed to power” is the name of the game these days as companies — data centers in particular — need all the help they can get bringing new electricity sources online. Halcyon, which bills itself as “the AI platform for energy,” helps address this issue by helping energy professionals navigate and interpret vast volumes of information from regulatory findings to utility data, enabling more efficient and informed decisionmaking across energy markets and policy landscapes.

This week, the company announced a $21 million Series A round, led by the software-focused climate tech firm Energize Capital, to expand its platform’s capabilities, source even more data, and expand its team. The startup’s AI tool was built and trained on a deep catalogue of energy data from regulators including state public utility commissions, independent system operators, regional transmission organizations, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, enabling users to query its sector-specific database as they would ChatGPT and track developments on particular questions.

“Despite representing as much as 10% of global GDP, multi-billion dollar energy investments are being made with opaque, incomplete, and fragmented information,” Bruce Falck, Halcyon’s co-founder and CEO, said in a company blog post about the new funding. “Halcyon makes complex and fragmented energy information discoverable, actionable, and valuable.” In addition to its main platform, the startup sells subscriptions to datasets such as its Gas Power Plant Tracker and New Substation Development Tracker, which can also inform data center citing decisions, for example.

Cocoon Raises $15 Million to Cut Emissions From Concrete

The world produces roughly 30 billion metric tons of concrete annually, making it the most widely used man-made material on earth — and the source of about 8% of global CO2 emissions. That’s due to the energy-intensive production process of cement, the glue that holds the concrete mixture together. Now though, the London-based startup Cocoon Carbon promises to reduce the emissions intensity of concrete through the addition of industrial byproducts known as “supplementary cementitious materials,” raising a $15 million Series A to help scale production.

SCMs are nothing new — they’ve been a part of standard concrete mixes for decades due to their durability-enhancing properties. But today they’re largely sourced from the byproducts of coal plants and iron blast furnaces — technologies that are falling out of favor as natural gas and renewables scale and electric arc furnaces replace blast furnaces in the steel production process. That’s tightened the market for SCMs, causing prices to double since 2017, at the same time that construction is booming. To address this shortage, Cocoon has developed a rapid cooling system to convert steel slag residue from electric arc furnaces into a cement replacement that it says can reduce concrete emissions by up to 40%.

The startup says its ability to retrofit its system directly onto electric arc furnaces is crucial for cost-competitiveness, drawing a contrast with “other emerging alternatives to cement” — startups Brimstone and Sublime Systems come to mind — which it claims will carry the dreaded “green premium.” Cocoon is planning to use the new capital to build out its first commercial demonstration facility in the U.S., ultimately targeting deployment at 50 steel mills by 2035.

Rubi Secures $7.5 Million to Turned Captured Carbon Into Clothes

The fashion industry is slyly one of the world’s largest emitters, with textile production alone accounting for about 1.2 billion tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions — roughly equivalent to Germany, the U.K., and France’s annual emissions combined. But the materials company Rubi thinks it’s found a more sustainable approach to fashion, raising a $7.5 million seed round to support the production of textile fibers such as viscose and lyocell from captured carbon dioxide. The company has already piloted its process with partners such as Walmart, Reformation, and H&M, the latter of which also participated in this latest funding round.

To produce raw material for textiles, the company sources captured carbon from industrial flue gas and feeds it into its enzyme reactor, where a cascade of chemical reactions converts the CO2 into cellulose polymers. The resulting cellulose pulp is then recovered and supplied to Rubi’s partners, who spin it into fibers and yarns using existing textile manufacturing infrastructure. The startup’s approach differs from traditional fermentation and chemical methods, which rely on either microbes like yeast or fossil-derived feedstocks such as natural gas to produce polymers, systems the startup says are less efficient, more emissions intensive, and costlier than its own.

Rubi plans to use this latest funding to develop an industrial demonstration system capable of producing commercial quantities of its materials for its growing customer base, from which it’s already secured $60 million in non-binding offtake agreements. While clothing brands are Rubi’s first customers, the company plans to expand into other industries such as consumer packaged goods, aerospace, and chemicals.