Northvolt's Recycling Patents Land at Refinyx, and the First Big Customer Is American
Northvolt raised more than $13 billion on the promise of a European battery industry. It filed for Chapter 11 in November 2024 with $5.8 billion of debt and about $30 million in cash, and went into Swedish bankruptcy in March 2025, the largest in modern Swedish industrial history. Eighteen months on, the pieces have nearly all been sold. On September 25 the last valuable one found a buyer.
Refinyx, a Stockholm startup, came out of stealth by buying Northvolt’s recycling technology: a portfolio of 134 patents and the 13,000-square-foot pilot and lab facility in Västerås. It also says it has signed its first major US customer. It won’t name the customer or the price. Its backers are Qarlbo Energy, the investment company of EQT founder Conni Jonsson, and Thisbe, which is owned by FAM, the holding company of the Wallenberg foundations. The three co-founders are CEO Mahmood Alemrajabi, CTO Ramiar Vaziri and chief business officer Dhruv Malhotra. They spent eight years building the process inside Northvolt’s Revolt recycling unit.
The pattern is worth noticing. The Swedish recycling chemistry is owned by Swedish money. Its first large buyer is American.
Northvolt was sold for parts
The factories went west. Lyten, a California lithium-sulfur startup, bought the Skellefteå gigafactory (Northvolt Ett) and Northvolt Labs, and closed that deal on February 27, 2026. It picked up the Polish energy storage plant as well. In March it signed a binding deal for the Revolt Ett recycling plant in Skellefteå, which has 8,500 tonnes a year of capacity and came with licences to key technology. Norsk Hydro had already bought out Northvolt’s half of Hydrovolt, the Norwegian recycling joint venture, in January 2025 for a few million dollars. The Quebec project was cancelled.
So the recycling business ended up split three ways. Hydro took one plant. Lyten took another, along with licences to use the process. Refinyx took the patent portfolio itself, the lab where the process was developed, and the people who developed it. For a buyer, the last of those is the best deal. Plants are local and expensive, and the most they can do is their nameplate capacity. A patent family can be licensed to any plant in any country.
Refinyx is selling a missing step
Most Western battery recycling stops halfway. Recyclers shred cells into black mass, a powder rich in nickel, cobalt and lithium, then ship it to Asian refiners (mostly Chinese) that turn it into battery-grade chemicals. The recycler takes the lower-margin half of the value. The refiner takes the chemistry. And the recycled metal comes back into Western supply chains through the same Chinese processing that US and EU rules are now written to limit.
Refinyx says its process skips that step. It claims direct battery-grade output at industrial scale with no organic solvents, which means dropping the solvent-extraction circuits that make up much of a conventional hydrometallurgy plant’s cost and complexity. It works on spent batteries and gigafactory scrap, and also on industrial residues and municipal waste. Rare earths and phosphorus are next. Alemrajabi’s view is that eight years of R&D and one industrial-scale plant have put the hard part behind them.
Malhotra’s pitch is more direct. He argues that much of the sector built its business case on premiums the market won’t pay over the long run. Western recyclers have leaned on buyers paying extra for recycled content, for low-carbon metal and for non-Chinese origin. When nickel and lithium prices fell, most of those premiums shrank, and so did the recyclers. Li-Cycle went through Canadian insolvency proceedings in 2025 and was sold to Glencore. A recycler that makes finished battery-grade material at a cost that competes without subsidies doesn’t need a green premium. That’s the claim Refinyx will have to prove on its US contract.
Why the first customer is in America
Refinyx’s first big customer is American because US rules pay for what Europe only talks about. US tax credits and procurement rules now penalise Chinese content in battery supply chains. That gives a refiner that can certify metal as never having passed through China a real price advantage. Europe has the Battery Regulation, with recycled-content targets that start in 2031, and the Critical Raw Materials Act’s benchmarks. But targets don’t sign offtake contracts. American buyers facing restrictions on foreign entities of concern need compliant material now.
There’s a venture argument too. Buying technology out of bankruptcy is about the cheapest way to get eight years of development and a large patent estate. Northvolt’s creditors paid for the R&D, and the buyer inherits the results. That’s a good trade for patient Swedish capital. Jonsson built EQT. The Wallenberg foundations have been backing Swedish industry for over a century. Neither is in it for a quick exit.
For European industrial policy the result is awkward but not a total loss. Brussels spent years treating Northvolt as the continent’s answer to CATL, backing it with EIB loans and a German state-aid package for the Heide plant. The cell factories now belong to an American startup. The recycling know-how, the part of the battery chain where Europe had a real technical lead, stayed in Swedish hands. But it earns its first revenue in the US, because that’s where the rules turn provenance into money.
If Refinyx’s process works at its US customer’s scale, the Northvolt estate will have produced one clear success. It won’t be the one Europe paid for.