Altilium Locks In £18.5M to Build the UK’s First Commercial EV Refinery

Key Takeaways

1. Plymouth-based clean tech startup Altilium has secured £18.5 million in grant funding from the UK government’s DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund to build ACT3, Britain’s first commercial refinery for recovering critical minerals from end-of-life EV batteries.
2. The ACT3 facility will process 24,000 EV batteries per year, recovering over 95% of cathode metals and over 99% of graphite, producing materials with up to 74% lower carbon emissions than mined equivalents.
3. The grant is part of a broader £138.1 million DRIVE35 package aimed at strengthening the UK’s automotive supply chain and reducing reliance on battery materials sourced from China.
4. Altilium has now raised over $48 million in total funding across 13 rounds, with prior private investors including Japan’s Marubeni Corporation, Mizuho Bank, and Chile’s SQM Lithium Ventures.

Quick Recap

UK clean technology company Altilium has secured a £18.5 million government grant to construct ACT3, the country’s first commercial-scale refinery dedicated to recovering critical battery minerals from end-of-life electric vehicles. The funding was announced on April 9, 2026, through the DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund, a programme delivered by the Department for Business and Trade in partnership with the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK and Innovate UK. Located in Plymouth, Devon, the plant is expected to begin equipment installation in summer 2026, with commissioning targeted for end of 2027.

The £18.5M Build-Out Strategy

The new facility, being constructed on a 4-acre site in Plymouth where Altilium already operates the UK’s only hydrometallurgical pilot plant for EV battery recycling, will represent a substantial leap from the company’s existing ACT2 scale-up operation. Engineering design work is being completed by Hatch, a leading global engineering consultancy, with the building shell already complete ahead of summer 2026 equipment installation.

At the heart of ACT3 is Altilium’s proprietary EcoCathode™ process, a hydrometallurgical technique that recovers over 95% of cathode metals including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, plus more than 99% of graphite from battery scrap. The plant will produce nickel mixed hydroxide precipitate (MHP), lithium sulphate, and graphite, all critical intermediate materials needed for domestic battery cathode production. This marks a sharp departure from how most UK battery recycling has operated to date, which has focused primarily on shredding batteries and producing black mass that is then exported overseas for further chemical processing.

The DRIVE35 Scale-Up Fund offers grants of between £2.5 million and £20 million to UK-registered businesses, specifically designed to help companies navigate the “valley of death” between pilot-scale success and full commercial deployment. Critically, the fund requires grant recipients to unlock at least twice their grant amount in private investment, meaning Altilium’s £18.5 million award is expected to catalyse at least £37 million in additional private capital.

Altilium CEO Kamran Mahdavi described the announcement as a “pivotal moment,” noting that scaling the company’s recycling technology and building the UK’s first commercial facility of its kind would “close the loop on battery materials and enhance the growth, productivity and competitiveness of the UK automotive supply chain.” The company has confirmed that the grant is expected to unlock further private investment from both new and existing shareholders.

​Why Britain Needs This Refinery Right Now?

The timing of Altilium’s raise could not be more deliberate. The UK sits at an inflection point in its EV supply chain strategy: the government has committed £2.5 billion to accelerate domestic electric vehicle manufacturing, of which the broader DRIVE35 programme represents a £2 billion, five-year investment running from 2025-26 to 2029-30. The programme is forecast to leverage £6.6 billion in private investment, support over 50,000 jobs, and cut up to 10.7 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent emissions across the UK.​

The geopolitical imperative is equally sharp. Britain’s £18.5 million award to Altilium sits within a £138.1 million DRIVE35 announcement that explicitly targets reducing reliance on battery materials primarily sourced from China. Critical minerals like lithium, nickel, and cobalt underpin every EV battery on the road today, and without domestic refining capability, those minerals continue to leave UK shores as unprocessed black mass, only to return as finished cathode materials at far higher prices.

Private climate tech investment in Europe fell to a five-year low in early 2025, making government-backed industrial grants like DRIVE35 an increasingly vital source of capital for companies building the physical infrastructure the energy transition requires.  Altilium’s own fundraising history reflects this environment: its Series B oversubscribed retail raise closed within just 22 hours and attracted over 750 individual investors, a sign of genuine public appetite for domestic battery circularity.

The EV battery recycling market itself is projected to grow from USD 4.88 billion in 2026 to USD 12.77 billion by 2030, growing at a 27.2% compound annual growth rate. Beyond ACT3, Altilium has already outlined a roadmap to a future ACT4 “mega-scale refinery” in Teesside capable of processing battery waste from 150,000 EVs per year and producing 30,000 metric tonnes of low-carbon cathode active material, enough to meet roughly 20% of the UK’s projected domestic CAM requirement by 2030.

Competitive Landscape

Altilium is not alone in the UK battery recycling space, but it occupies a distinctly differentiated position focused on integrated chemical refining rather than upstream dismantling. The two most comparable UK-based competitors at a similar or adjacent stage are Recyclus Group and Ecobat UK.

Strategic read

Altilium holds a clear lead on output quality and supply chain integration. By producing battery-grade intermediate materials on UK soil rather than exporting black mass, Altilium retains more economic value domestically and aligns directly with the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre’s (UKBIC) goals for cathode qualification with automotive OEMs. Recyclus Group and Ecobat, while operationally ahead at the upstream stage, essentially remain feedstock suppliers until they invest in their own downstream chemical refining, a gap Altilium is now uniquely positioned to exploit.​

TechnoTrenz’s Takeaway

I’ll be honest: when I first saw this headline, my instinct was to file it under “another clean energy press release.” But the more I dug into Altilium’s story, the more I think this is genuinely one of the most structurally important cleantech announcements out of the UK this year.

In my experience covering industrial funding rounds, what separates real infrastructure builds from concept-stage noise is the presence of serious, strategic capital at the table. Altilium already had Marubeni Corporation and Mizuho Bank in its Series B before this government grant ever arrived. Japan’s Marubeni does not write US$5 million cheques into a Plymouth startup on a whim. That institutional backing tells me the EcoCathode™ process has been stress-tested well beyond the lab.
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I think this is a big deal because the UK has been exporting its battery problem for years. Black mass goes out, finished cathode material comes back in at a steep premium, and Britain’s EV supply chain remains structurally dependent on overseas processors. ACT3 breaks that loop for 24,000 battery packs a year, and the ACT4 Teesside mega-refinery targeting 150,000 EVs per year could eventually make the UK a net exporter of battery intermediates rather than a raw material donor.