Last week, Circu Li-ion announced that they raised a €8.5m Seed to automate and scale their battery upcycling operations. Silicon Luxembourg spoke to CEO and co-founder Antoine Welter to discuss their short term plans, AI integration, and achieving a circular value chain.
Congrats on raising an impressive Seed round, that must feel amazing. Is €8.5m in line with what you expected?
It’s amazing when we build a really great company. There are enough people who raise a lot of money who didn’t end up building a cool company. So I would say it’s amazing when we spend the money wisely.
It’s a bit more than what we envisioned but I think that it shows us that we are solving a very pressing issue. Raising more in this case actually helps us develop faster and also provide more solutions to a market that is still very manual and needs help.
What are the key priorities for spending these funds?
The first priority is to continue expanding the team with a lot of great tech talent, mostly on the data and AI side. Why? Because we’re building the biggest battery data repository to be able to automate the upcycling of these batteries. That’s really the focus in the short term, building a huge repository on how to open and upcycle these batteries.
Another focus in the next 12 months is to continue the rollout with clients across different European markets.
“Today, the concept of urban mining is still a bit of a myth because a lot of the work is still very manual.”
Antoine Welter, co-founder & CEO of Circu Li-ion
You plan to upcycle 3 billion batteries by 2035. Can you contextualize this number?
The amount of batteries between 2019 and 2039 will have multiplied by 50 in terms of Gigawatt hours. There’s a battery in everything nowadays and although 3 billion seems very high if we deploy a few hundred machines it’s definitely doable.
To give you an idea, our facility in Germany can upcycle about 6 000 tonnes of batteries per year. Our initial focus has been on industrial batteries and now we are constantly increasing our battery libraries to include more and more appliances.
In your press release, you mentioned wanting to support the circular battery value chain. How circular would you say this value chain is today?
I think that in general, the market is at around 15-20% circularity and I think we can push it very very far. I think it’s very realistic that in the next 2-5 years we will go to 90% circularity.
What are the hurdles to getting there?
It’s a pure technology game and the only hurdle is investment in technology. It takes a lot of upfront investment to go there but I think it’s definitely doable.
Right now, it’s about scaling the technology. Every day, there are new batteries entering the market and we want to continuously add them to our battery library, so it’s basically a never-ending job.
Circu Li-ion Raises €8.5m Seed To Automate Battery Upcycling
How do you plan on integrating AI into your operations?
Today, the concept of urban mining is still a bit of a myth because a lot of the work is still very manual. But with new technologies such as AI and computer vision on the rise, dismantling complex products with machines is becoming a reality more and more.
We already use AI in four steps of our process. It’s really application-driven AI and we’re processing tonnes of data which we’re going to publish with a big data provider soon. Data will be key to making our targets work because we need the flexibility it provides. Flexibility is the name of the game.
What motivates you to push Circu Li-ion further?
We want to make the circular economy a reality with an awesome team. If we don’t combine a very entrepreneurial and interdisciplinary team, we’re not going to make it. But you need various talents with the right attitude and we want to make this happen.
