Holyvolt has raised $45 million in equity to expand a battery-materials development system that connects AI predictions with physical laboratory testing. Fortune reports that Fifth Wall, Zone II, CC.VC and angel investors from defense and finance backed the Stockholm company’s round.
The pitch is partly geopolitical. China produces about 85% of the world’s cathode active material and 80% of battery cells, according to Fortune. Rather than compete directly on dominant chemistries such as NMC and lithium iron phosphate, Holyvolt wants to find alternatives that can be manufactured through Western supply chains.
A model connected to a physical lab
Holyvolt’s core asset is Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego company it merged with in March 2026 in a deal reported at $73 million. Wildcat built an automated system for making and testing thousands of candidate battery materials in parallel.
The company says Wildcat’s platform has completed more than 225 projects for over 85 customers during 18 years and tested more than 500,000 cells. Holyvolt has trained AI models on those results, then connected the models back to the lab. The models recommend materials, the lab builds and cycles real cells, and each result informs the next predictions.
CEO Mathias Ingvarsson told Fortune that the laboratory already works 10 times faster than conventional research and development, citing a customer case study. That performance claim has not been independently tested in the attached reporting, and Holyvolt still treats physical experiments as the deciding step for whether a proposed chemistry works.
DRX is the first planned product
The first material family Holyvolt plans to commercialize is DRX, short for disordered rocksalt. The company describes it as a high-energy cathode that avoids nickel and cobalt. It expects to begin commercialization in 2027 with unmanned aerial vehicles and other defense applications before pursuing larger mobility markets.
That schedule lines up with a procurement deadline. Beginning Oct. 1, 2027, a provision of the fiscal 2024 defense authorization law bars the Pentagon from buying covered batteries from CATL, BYD and four other named Chinese manufacturers. Holyvolt is also developing DRX formulations for automakers and data centers, but none of those products is commercially available yet.
Holyvolt does not plan to build its own gigafactories. Chief Operating Officer Steven Prast told Fortune that the company is considering licensing, toll manufacturing and joint ventures, leaving industrial-scale production to partners.
