Circu Li-ion is a European battery-technology company pioneering automated, AI-driven upcycling of lithium-ion batteries. Founded in 2021 and headquartered at Technoport in Foetz, Luxembourg, the company tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks in the battery circular economy: the slow, hazardous, and labor-intensive process of disassembling and sorting used cells and modules. By combining artificial intelligence with advanced electrochemical techniques and robotics, Circu Li-ion automates this work to recover more value from end-of-life batteries than conventional shredding-based recycling.
The company's offering spans several services, including Disassembly as a Service and a Machine as a Service model, alongside tools such as CircuFit, X-DL, and DigiOp. Rather than immediately destroying batteries, Circu Li-ion's approach prioritizes recovering reusable components and grading cells for second-life applications where possible, then channeling the rest into efficient material recovery. A central part of its strategy is data: by processing large volumes of diverse battery types, the company is building one of the world's largest repositories of battery recycling and diagnostics data, which feeds back into improving its AI-driven automation.
This matters because the surge in electric vehicles and energy storage is creating a fast-growing stream of end-of-life batteries containing critical materials such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper. Recovering these materials domestically reduces dependence on mining and imports while cutting the environmental footprint of battery production. Circu Li-ion partners with EV manufacturers (OEMs) and recyclers to integrate its automated systems into their operations.
The company was founded by CEO Antoine Welter and CTO Xavier Kohll. It raised an €8.5 million seed round, including equity led by BonVenture plus EIC Accelerator grant funding, and subsequently secured a €14 million Series A co-led by HG Ventures and Suma Capital (with additional European grants). The company has been advancing toward dismantling entire electric vehicles to recover critical raw materials at scale.