NordicNinja
Assembly Line
tozero raises €11 million to expand recycled lithium production
tozero, a Munich-based battery recycling startup, has raised €11 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by NordicNinja, with new investors including In-Q-Tel, Honda, and JGC Group. Existing investors Atlantic Labs, Verve Ventures, and Possible Ventures also participated in the round.
Founded in 2022 by Sarah Fleischer and Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann, tozero focuses on sustainable lithium-ion battery recycling, addressing Europe’s lithium supply gap by recovering critical raw materials and reintegrating them into global supply chains. This latest funding will support tozero’s plans to build its first industrial-scale plant and scale up production of recycled lithium in Europe.
VSParticle raises €6.5 million for next-generation material discovery printers
VSParticle (VSP), a leading supplier of nanoparticle synthesis and deposition tools, has raised a €6.5 million A2 extension round led by NordicNinja and previous investor Plural to continue its mission to unlock a century of material innovation in the next 10 years.
VSP’s technology enables materials to be broken down to the size of nanoparticles and produced at the push of a button, allowing university researchers and commercial R&D teams to experiment to create new materials that will power next-generation products. It can take up to 10 years to discover new materials in a lab and a further five to bring them to mass production, but VSP’s technology is supporting teams to reduce the overall time of material discovery down to only one year.
The new funding, which also included participation from previous investor Hermann Hauser Investment, brings the total raised by VSParticle to €24.5 million. The fresh capital will be used to further the development of the startup’s technology so its next-generation printers have up to 100 times higher output and will also support the company in expanding to Japan and doubling down in the US and Europe.