Metastable Materials: Recycling Batteries Into Metal

Inside a Bengaluru facility, spent lithium-ion batteries are stripped down and refined into lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and aluminium — commodity metals sold to industries as varied as glassmaking, cement, and magnets. The company behind this operation, Metastable Materials, has spent nearly four years building what it calls a proof point for domestic critical-minerals recovery in a country that imports most of its battery-metal supply.

What Metastable Materials does

Founded in October 2021 by IIT Roorkee graduates Shubham Vishvakarma and Manikumar Uppala, Metastable Materials operates a refinery that extracts lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and aluminium from spent batteries and sells them as refined commodity metals. The Bengaluru facility has an installed processing capacity of 1,500 tonnes per year and employs more than 50 people across office and manufacturing operations.

Rather than positioning itself narrowly as a battery recycler, Vishvakarma describes the company as a "sustainable raw material supplier" that happens to be "a really good refiner." That framing shows up in its customer list: glass manufacturers, ceramics producers, cement companies, grease manufacturers, the stainless-steel industry, pigment manufacturers, magnet producers, casting manufacturers, and bus bar manufacturers all buy Metastable's refined metals.

The company holds five patents, including one international filing. Vishvakarma has said the team found a way for materials inside a battery to react with each other during processing without adding external inputs — a claim tied to those patents, though the report does not quantify how this compares to competitors' processes.

Funding and traction timeline

January 2022: Pre-seed round led by Akshay Singhal and Kartik Hajela of Log9 Materials.
2023: Seed round from Surge, Speciale Invest, Theia Ventures, and Climate9ers.
2025: Revenue began flowing.

The report does not disclose the size of either funding round, nor current revenue figures or growth rate since 2025. There's also no detail on capacity utilization at the existing facility or a stated timeline for scaling beyond 1,500 tonnes per year.

The competitive and market backdrop

Metastable competes in India against Attero Recycling, Lohum, BatX Energies and Tata Chemicals — all established players in battery recycling. No quantitative comparison of refining output or process efficiency between Metastable and these competitors is available.

The broader opportunity is sizable: the global battery recycling market was valued at $18 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $32.9 billion by 2034, according to IMARC Group. India's structural reliance on imported critical battery metals adds a domestic angle to that growth story, potentially creating demand for suppliers like Metastable that can localize metal supply.

Risks on the path to scale

Three risks stand out. First, physical infrastructure for recycling plants takes time to build, which could slow scaling relative to demand — a point Vishvakarma himself raised, noting the company has proven its process works and now must scale it. Second, competition from larger, established players could limit market share as the sector grows. Third, Metastable's business depends on a continuous supply of spent batteries and demand from a range of industrial buyers, exposing it to multiple end-market cycles simultaneously.

Why founders should care

For founders building in circular-economy, materials-recovery, or other hardware-heavy climate sectors, Metastable's trajectory offers a few probabilistic signals worth weighing:

The market's projected near-doubling by 2034 suggests the addressable opportunity for recycling and materials-recovery startups is likely expanding, though actual capture will depend on execution and competitive positioning.
Diversifying downstream customers — as Metastable has done across glass, cement, stainless-steel, and other industries — may plausibly reduce revenue concentration risk for similar startups, since no single sector's demand cycle can sink the business alone.
Founders in hardware-heavy climate ventures should likely budget for longer scaling timelines than software peers, given Vishvakarma's explicit acknowledgment that physical plants "take time to build."
Policy and market tailwinds tied to import dependence — in this case, India's reliance on imported critical battery metals — could favor domestic recovery startups, though this advantage is likely most pronounced in markets with similar import gaps.

What's still unknown