Last year, Beverly-based Nth Cycle announced that it raised $12.5 million in venture capital. Now the company has its sights set on a larger funding amount, and it’s already making moves toward securing that capital.
This month, Nth Cycle began raising venture funding for a $50 million round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing notes that the company has already raised about $20 million from 12 investors toward its goal amount. The company declined to comment further on the fundraising.
Nth Cycle aims to use its technology to create a low carbon, cheap and domestic supply chain for rare earth minerals. These minerals are used in products like wind turbines, electric vehicles and solar panels, and are obtained from domestic mines as well as recycled products, including lithium-ion batteries.
The company pulls these minerals out through a process it calls “electro-extraction.” Or, as co-founder and CEO Megan O’Connor explained to BostInno last year, you can think of their technology as a 1,000-square-foot Brita filter.
“Our system is water filtration paired with electricity,” O’Connor said at the time. “We have this solid waste, whether it’s dirt, ore straight from the ground, or a spent battery. We turn that into a water-based solution and we run that through our water filter which has carbon.”
The unit pushes different electric currents across the carbon filter, which selectively pulls out different materials.
This approach replaces processes to refine minerals that involve pyrometallurgy, essentially a large furnace that burns materials at high temperatures, which produces a lot of carbon emissions.
Nth Cycle’s Series A round last year was co-led by the investment arm of Frankstahl and Volo Earth. Local firms Clean Energy Ventures and MassMutual’s MM Catalyst Fund also participated in the round. The Beverly-based company also raised a $3.2M seed round in April 2021 and received a $2.15 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in December 2022.
After announcing the Series A, O’Connor told BostInno that the funding would be used to launch the company’s first three projects in battery recycling and mining over the next 18 months.
Nth Cycle said it began operation of its first commercial-scale electro-extraction unit in August of last year. The unit began by working with black mass, otherwise known as the materials produced once a battery has been processed for recycling.
