Funding Friday: Robots Want Fast-Charging Batteries

Following a quiet week for new deals, the industry is back at it with a bunch of capital flowing into some of the industry’s most active areas. My colleague Alexander C. Kaufman already told you about one of the more buzzworthy announcements from data center-land in Wednesday’s AM newsletter: Wave energy startup Panthalassa raised $140 million in a round led by Peter Thiel to “perform AI inference computing at sea” using nodes powered by the ocean’s waves.

This week also saw fresh funding for more conventional data center infrastructure, as Nyobolt and Skeleton Technologies both announced later-stage rounds for data center backup power solutions. Meanwhile, it turns out Redwood Materials is not the only company bringing in significant capital for second-life EV battery systems — Moment Energy just raised $40 million to pursue a similar approach. Elsewhere, investors backed an effort to rebuild domestic magnesium production, and, in a glimmer of hope for a sector on the outs, gave a boost to green cement startup Terra CO2.

Fast-Charging Battery Startup Nyobolt Hits $1 Billion Valuation

Cambridge-based startup Nyobolt has become the latest battery company to reach a $1 billion valuation, with its expansion into the data center market helping fuel excitement around its tech. Spun out of University of Cambridge research in 2019, the company develops ultra-fast-charging batteries based on a modified lithium-ion chemistry. Its core innovation is an anode made from niobium tungsten oxide, which Nyobolt says enables its batteries to charge to 80% in less than five minutes, with a cycle life that’s 10 times longer than conventional lithium-ion, all without the risk of fire.

The company has now raised a $60 Series C, following what it describes as a period of “rapid commercial momentum,” with revenue increasing five-fold year-over-year as customers in the robotics and data center industry piled in. Symbotic, an autonomous robotics company and existing customer, led the latest round. While Symbotic previously relied on supercapacitors to power its robots, Nyobolt’s says its batteries provide six times more energy capacity in a lighter package, allowing its warehouse robots to work for retailers like Walgreens, Target, and Kroger around the clock.

Now the startup is targeting data center customers too, positioning its tech as a fast-acting fix for the sudden power surges common to large-scale artificial intelligence workloads, as well as a temporary backup power solution for outages. While it has no confirmed domestic data center customers to date, it does have a nonbinding agreement with the Indian state of Rajasthan to deploy over 100 megawatts of off-grid AI data center and power management infrastructure, part of a broader push to expand its presence across the country.

Notably, the press release made no mention of plans to sell its tech to electric vehicle automakers, though this appears to have been a central focus previously. As recently as last summer, executive vice president Ramesh Narasimhan told the BBC that he hoped Nyobolt’s batteries would “transform the experience of owning an EV.” But while its tech does enable extremely fast charging, its underlying chemistry is not optimized for long-range driving. A sports car built to test the company’s batteries had just a 155 mile range. So like many of its climate tech peers, the company appears to be betting that data centers now represent a more reliable opportunity.

Supercapacitor Startup Skeleton Technologies Secures $39 Million Ahead of Planned IPO

This week brought additional news from another European player aiming to smooth out data center power surges. Estonia-based supercapacitor startup Skeleton Technologies raised $39 million in what it describes as the first close of a pre-IPO funding round, with a U.S. listing planned for next year. Its core tech is built around a “curved graphene” structure, which the company likens to a crumpled sheet of paper with a high surface area. The graphene’s many exposed surfaces and edges allows it to hold more electric charge, which Skeleton says delivers a 72% improvement in energy density.

Like Nyobolt, Skeleton says its tech offers faster response times and longer cycle life. But supercapacitors are a fundamentally different technology than Nyobolt’s modified lithium-ion solution. Though they offer near-instantaneous response times, they store very little energy — just enough to smooth out microsecond power spikes in GPU workloads. Nyobolt’s batteries, by contrast, aim not only to smooth out data center power spikes, but also to deliver about 90 seconds of backup power in the case of an outage, before a generator or other backup source kicks in.

Skeleton is already mass-producing supercapacitors in Germany and delivering to unnamed “major U.S. hyperscalers for AI infrastructure.” It’s also making moves to expand its U.S. footprint ahead of its pending IPO, opening an engineering facility in Houston and aiming to begin domestic manufacturing of AI data center solutions in the first half of this year.

All Aboard Coalition Pushes to Scale Green Cement Startup Terra CO2

Last year brought a wave of new climate tech coalitions, with one of the most ambitious efforts known as the All Aboard Coalition. This group of venture firms is targeting the investment gap known as the missing middle, which falls between early-stage venture rounds and infrastructure funding. The model is relatively mechanical: When three or more member firms participate in a later-stage round for a company, the coalition automatically coinvests out of its own fund, matching the members’ combined contribution.

The group made its first investment in January, supporting the AI-powered geothermal exploration and development company Zanskar’s Series C round. This week, it announced its second: a $22 million commitment to low-carbon cement startup Terra CO2, bringing the company’s Series B total to $147 million. Cement production accounts for roughly 8% of global emissions, a figure Terra aims to shrink by making so-called "supplementary cementitious materials” — which can partially displace traditional cement in concrete mixes — from abundant silicate rocks. By grinding and thermally processing these rocks into a glassy powder, Terra’s product mimics the properties of conventional cement. The company says it can replace up to 50% of the cement in typical concrete mixes, lowering associated emissions by as much as 70%.

The new funding will help Terra build its first commercial-scale plant in Texas, exactly the type of first-of-a-kind project that the coalition was designed to support. But the scale of this challenge remains clear. As noted in ImpactAlpha’s coverage, the coalition has raised just $100 million toward its goal of a $300 million fund — already a relatively modest goal considering the capital intensity of novel infrastructure projects. Bloomberg previously reported that the group aimed to raise the full amount by the end of October 2025, raising questions about the willingness of LPs to bet on projects at this crucial but capital-intensive juncture.

Moment Energy Lands $40 Million to Scale Repurposed EV Battery Systems

When I think about repurposing used electric vehicle batteries for stationary storage, I think of battery recycling giant Redwood Materials, which raised a $425 million Series E in January after moving aggressively into this promising market. But while Redwood’s well-established recycling business certainly provides it with the largest pipeline of used batteries, it’s far from the only company pursuing this business model. A smaller player with a largely similar approach underscored that this week, when it announced a $40 million Series B to scale its gigafactory in Texas and expand its facilities in British Columbia.

That’s Moment Energy, which focuses on using second-life EV batteries to power commercial and industrial sites such as data centers, hospitals, and factories. Like Redwood, it relies on proprietary software to aggregate battery packs with myriad chemistries and design specs into coordinated grid-scale systems. What the company sees as its critical differentiator, however, is its safety standards. Moment has achieved UL certification, a key safety benchmark that it says others in the industry have yet to meet.

In a shot at its competitors, the company described itself in a press release as the “only provider proven capable of deploying second-life battery storage systems in the built environment without special dispensations or regulatory loopholes.” While Moment never names names, Redwood’s first commercial-scale system sits on its own private land in an open air setting, where certification is arguably unnecessary. “What most other second life [battery] companies are now trying to say is, let’s just lobby to make second life UL certification easier, because it is impossible to get UL certification, as it stands,” the company’s CEO, Edward Chiang, told TechCrunch. “But at Moment, we say that’s not true. We got it.”

Magrathea Lands $24 Million to Rebuild Domestic Magnesium Production

As I wrote last September, it’s a good time to be a critical minerals startup, because as you may have heard, “critical minerals are the new oil.” These materials sit at the center of modern energy infrastructure — batteries, magnets, photovoltaic cells, and electrical wiring, to name just a few uses — plus their supply is concentrated in geopolitically tense regions and subject to extreme price volatility. It also certainly doesn’t hurt that the Trump administration loves them and wants to mine and refine way more of them in the U.S.

The latest beneficiary of this enthusiasm is Magrathea, which this week raised a $24 million Series A to build what it says will be the only new magnesium smelter in the U.S., in Arkansas. The company has now raised over $100 million in total, including a $28 million grant from the Department of Defense. Its approach relies on an electrolysis-based process that’s able to extract pure magnesium from seawater and brines, which it positions as a cleaner, cheaper alternative to the high-heat, emission-intensive method that China uses to produce most of the world’s magnesium today.

The U.S. military has taken note of this potential new domestic supply. Magrathea’s 2022 seed round coincided with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the military looked to scale domestic defense tech supply chains. Magnesium alloys are often used to help reduce weight in EV components, a benefit equally applicable to military helicopters, drones, and next-generation fighter jets. So while these defense applications represent somewhat of a pivot from the startup’s initial focus, a greener fighter jet is still better than a dirty fighter jet.