Holyvolt, a Swedish battery technology company founded in 2022, thinks it has a way to close it. On Thursday, the Volvo-backed startup announced the acquisition of Wildcat Discovery Technologies, a San Diego-based battery specialty materials company, in a deal valued at $73 million, structured as a mix of cash, stock and deferred milestone payments.
See also: Battery life: iPhone 17 Pro Max better than 35 smartphones
The battery industry is facing a translation problem. Researchers can identify promising new materials in the lab. The challenge is to transfer these discoveries through chemistry, engineering, and manufacturing without losing years and hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. The gap between discovery and production has long been one of the key bottlenecks in the transition to clean energy.
The transaction brings together two technologies that have been developed in parallel tracks for years: the screen printing process and water‑based production by Holyvolt and the High Performance Platform (HTP) of Wildcat, which can synthesize and control thousands of material combinations simultaneously.
Holyvolt CEO Mathias Ingvarssontold Impact Loop that the company was a previous customer of Wildcat before the acquisition. “Wildcat is today the world leader, arguably the best in the world, in battery chemistry,” he said. “They have focused on battery chemistry for 18 years and have become world leaders in anodes, cathodes, electrolytes and basically everything around a battery.”
See also: Volvo will continue to offer CarPlay support
The HTP of Wildcat is, in essence, a material discovery engine. It conducts combined experiments in parallel, a methodology that was originally developed for drug discovery and can identify the optimal battery chemistries up to ten times faster than conventional research methods. It is important that the platform creates structured material datasets at terabyte scale as it operates: the kind of high-quality, labeled data that machine learning models need to be truly useful and not merely decorative.
The contribution of Holyvolt is on the production side. Its process replaces the organic solvents used in conventional battery electrode coating with water‑based processing and uses screen‑printing techniques that have been developed over more than 20 years of research. The approach is designed to be flexible, modular and scalable, features that are hugely important when you try to move from pilot‑scale production to commercial volume without rebuilding the factory.
See also: CPSC: Fire hazard from Rad Power Bikes batteries
Together, the companies describe a pipeline that spans from discovery at the molecular level to pilot-scale production. The combined entity will operate from offices in Stockholm, Munich and San Diego, and will serve customers across the entire battery supply chain through technology development partnerships and licensing agreements.
