Holyvolt buys US battery pioneer Wildcat Discovery for $73M

The battery industry has a translation problem. Researchers can identify promising new materials in the lab; the challenge is moving those 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 defining bottlenecks of the clean energy transition.

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 materials specialist, in a $73 million deal structured as a mix of cash, equity, and deferred milestone payments.

The transaction brings together two technologies that have been developed on parallel tracks for years: Holyvolt’s screen-printing and water-based manufacturing process, and Wildcat’s High Throughput Platform (HTP), which can synthesise and screen thousands of material combinations ...