A European battery factory that became one of the most notorious climate tech setbacks of the last year is getting a new lease on life thanks to a US startup's high-stakes gamble.
Lyten, a California-based maker of cutting-edge batteries, said last week that it bought all remaining assets belonging to Northvolt, a Swedish battery firm that booked $15 billion in private investment and $50 billion in orders before collapsing into bankruptcy in November. Northvolt was building up to a much-anticipated public stock offering, and looked for a time like one of Europe's most promising new industrial companies in any sector, as well as its strongest rebuttal to the hegemony of Chinese clean tech manufacturers. But the company ultimately failed to crank out a sufficient number of batteries before running out of cash, due in part to a reliance on Chinese technology that led to technical snafus and internal culture clashes.
That created an opportunity for Lyten, which was eager to bring its manufacturing capabilities up to full commercial scale but struggling to find financiers willing to make an expensive bet on a new factory. So for a price that was undisclosed but which Lyten Chief Sustainability Officer Keith Norman told Semafor was "a very good deal" Lyten bought Northvolt's EV gigafactory and research lab in Sweden, a grid-scale battery factory in Poland, and the plans for a new factory in Germany. It also acquired much of Northvolt's intellectual property and hired several members of its executive staff, with plans to hire more.
"We feel very bullish that the pieces are in place" to run the facilities profitably, Norman said.
