BARCELONA, Spain — Ciclova, a Barcelona company that extracts lithium, nickel, and cobalt from spent electric-car batteries, said on Monday that it had raised 220 million euros from investors, the largest financing this year for a European recycling start-up and a bet that the continent will soon be awash in batteries it is legally required to reuse.
The round was led by a Copenhagen climate fund and joined by two carmakers’ venture arms and the European Investment Bank. The money will finance a plant in the port of Tarragona, 100 kilometers south of here, capable of processing 25,000 metric tons of battery material a year, roughly the contents of 60,000 car batteries, when it opens in 2028.
“Everyone has been talking about the wave of old batteries for 10 years. It is finally on the beach,” said Núria Albareda, 41, a chemical engineer who founded the company in 2019 and is its chief executive. “The first generation of electric cars sold in Europe is now 12, 13 years old. Those packs are coming to us whether we are ready or not.”
Ciclova’s process dissolves shredded cells in a proprietary acid mixture at low temperature and then separates the metals with selective membranes, a method it says recovers 95 percent of the lithium and uses about 40 percent less energy than the furnaces used by most recyclers today. Independent tests by a German materials institute, published in July, broadly confirmed the recovery rates at pilot scale.
The timing is driven by Brussels. The E.U.’s battery regulation requires that new batteries sold from 2031 contain minimum shares of recycled material, including 6 percent of their lithium and 16 percent of their cobalt, with the quotas rising later in the decade. Carmakers that cannot prove the recycled content will not be able to sell. “That rule turns black mass from waste into a commodity,” said Sofía Bermúdez, an analyst who follows the sector for a Madrid brokerage. “The question is who will own the plants when the quotas bite, and right now the answer is mostly China.”
Henrik Olesen, a partner at the Copenhagen fund that led the round, said the investment thesis was straightforward. “Europe will either recycle its own batteries or ship them to Asia and buy the metals back,” he said. “One of those is a business. The other is a tariff waiting to happen.”
Ms. Albareda said Ciclova employed 140 people and would hire about 200 more for the Tarragona plant. She is already thinking about the next one. “Germany has the cars,” she said. “Poland has the factories. We will go where the batteries die.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 12 of the European edition with the headline: Barcelona Start-Up That Pulls Lithium From Dead Batteries Raises 220 Million Euros.
