Startup Deep Dive : LOHUM — how India’s largest battery recycler became a critical-minerals producer

In FY25, LOHUM Cleantech reported revenue of ₹835 crore ($87 million) from selling battery metals it never mined. The company says it recovers roughly 70% of every lithium-ion battery that reaches an Indian recycler, yet it makes most of that money from a critical-minerals business that barely existed in India when it was founded in 2018.

That is the contradiction worth sitting with. LOHUM is usually described as a recycler, and recycling is where it started. But the value is in what comes out the other end: lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese, refined back into cathode-grade material that India otherwise imports, mostly from China. The bet is that a country adding electric two-wheelers, three-wheelers and grid storage faster than it can dig up metals will pay to keep those metals in circulation. So far the numbers have followed the bet, but the economics still ride on commodity prices LOHUM does not control, and on a scrap pile that has not fully arrived yet.

Quick facts

What LOHUM does

LOHUM takes lithium-ion batteries at the end of their life and turns them back into the materials that make new ones. It sits across three linked activities:

• Recycling: spent cells and battery scrap are broken down through its patented NEETM process to recover lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese, which are refined into cathode-grade raw material. LOHUM says NEETM recovers about 95% of battery raw materials at up to 99.5% purity (company-stated).
• Second-life repurposing: batteries that still hold usable charge are tested and rebuilt into packs for stationary energy storage rather than being shredded immediately.
• First-life manufacturing: a smaller line assembles new battery packs for electric two- and three-wheelers.

The customers are battery makers, automakers and energy firms that need cathode inputs or want their scrap handled under India’s producer-responsibility rules. Named partners and clients over the years include MG Motor India, Mercedes-Benz Energy, Stellantis, Ather, Altigreen, Log9 Materials, IIT Kanpur and commodities group Glencore (company disclosures and Business India).

The founding insight

Rajat Verma spent more than two decades in technology before starting LOHUM. He studied engineering at IIT Kanpur, took a master’s at Stanford and an MBA at Harvard Business School, and had worked as an early-stage technology investor. Around 2015 he noticed two curves crossing. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lithium-ion batteries were beginning to flow into a waste stream that nobody in India was set up to process. At the same time, electric mobility and grid storage were accelerating, which meant demand for the exact metals locked inside those dead batteries was about to climb.

The insight was that India did not have a lithium problem so much as a recovery problem. The country has little domestic lithium, cobalt or nickel and imports most of what it needs. Every recycled battery is therefore a small, above-ground mine. LOHUM was built in 2018 to work that seam: not to be a scrap dealer, but to be a domestic producer of sustainable battery raw materials, refining black mass locally instead of shipping it abroad. That framing, materials producer rather than waste handler, is the whole reason the business earns the margins it does.

The struggle years

The early problem was that almost nothing LOHUM needed could simply be bought. There was no off-the-shelf Indian recycling plant to copy, and importing a large-scale plant would have made the unit economics impossible. So the company did the hard, slow thing: it designed, fabricated, installed and commissioned its plant in-house rather than leaning on large plant-erection firms. That kept capital costs down but pushed the timeline out and put enormous execution risk on a young team.

Two structural headaches shaped these years:

• Feedstock was thin. India’s EV base was tiny in 2018-2020, so the volume of genuinely end-of-life batteries was small. A recycler is only as busy as the scrap it can collect, and early volumes had to be pieced together from consumer electronics, imports and industrial cells.
• Reverse logistics is dangerous and expensive. Moving dead lithium-ion batteries is a fire and safety hazard that needs specialised handling and transport, so collecting feedstock across a large country is a cost and compliance burden, not an afterthought.

Verma has also described a deliberate widening of the model: LOHUM did not stay a pure recycler but added second-life repurposing, testing every incoming battery for reuse in stationary storage before recycling it. That pivot was a response to a real gap, but it also meant building two operating capabilities at once on limited capital. Revenue was modest through this stretch, at roughly ₹106 crore in FY22, before the model started to scale.

The turning point

The turn came when volume, technology and money arrived together in 2023-2024. Revenue jumped from ₹106 crore in FY22 to ₹308 crore in FY23, a 2.9x increase in a single year, and the company posted a profit of ₹8.88 crore instead of the losses typical of hardware-heavy startups (Entrackr, reporting MCA filings). Then in August 2023 Baring Private Equity Partners led a ₹188 crore ($23 million) Series B1 tranche, the first institutional cheque large enough to fund real capacity.

The contrast across that line is stark. Before it, LOHUM was a self-financed engineering project recovering metals at small scale. After it, LOHUM was an institutionally backed materials producer expanding recycling capacity, adding a refining stream and being valued, by March 2024, at about ₹3,470 crore ($422 million). Revenue kept climbing to ₹529 crore in FY24 and ₹835 crore in FY25. The event that mattered was not a single product launch but the moment the business proved it could grow revenue nearly threefold while staying profitable, which is what unlocked the capital to scale.

The money behind it

LOHUM has raised across several rounds, with figures reported by trackers and specialist media:

• Series A: $7 million, in January 2021 (Entrackr).
• Series B1: ₹188 crore ($23 million) in August 2023, led by Baring Private Equity Partners (₹70 crore), with Ventureast, Cactus Partners and Stride Ventures (debt) participating (Entrackr).
• Series B (further tranche): ₹119.3 crore ($14.5 million) in March 2024, led by Singularity Growth (₹55 crore), taking the Series B to about $37.5 million by Entrackr’s count; some databases size the full round at roughly $54 million.
• Pre-Series C: ₹131.4 crore (~$15 million) in November 2025, led by Growth I9 Opportunity LLP, with Baring and others participating.
• Latest: ₹230 crore in July 2026 from Ambit GPC via Poonawalla Vision Fund 1 and family offices.

Cumulative funding is reported at around $135 million across 16 rounds by Crunchbase and Tracxn, though the disclosed, named rounds add up to less; treat the higher figure as a database total, not an audited one. What each backer changed is roughly this: Baring’s 2023 lead gave LOHUM its first institutional balance sheet and credibility; Singularity Growth’s 2024 tranche funded capacity; Growth I9 and Poonawalla Vision Fund extended the runway toward a listing. Management has said it is targeting an IPO by 2027 and has been reported to be lining up a pre-IPO round of around ₹1,000 crore (Autocar Professional; IPO Central, reported).

How it makes money

The model is a spread business dressed as a technology company. Money in, costs out, and where the margin sits:

• Money in: LOHUM buys or collects end-of-life batteries and scrap, recovers the metals, and sells refined cathode raw materials and recovered compounds to battery and materials buyers. It also earns from second-life packs sold into stationary storage and from a smaller first-life pack line.
• Costs out: feedstock acquisition, reverse logistics, energy and reagents for refining, and the capital cost of building plants. Because LOHUM engineered its own plants, it traded a heavier upfront build for lower imported-equipment cost.
• Where the margin sits: in the refining step, not the shredding. Turning black mass into high-purity, cathode-grade material is the part that commands a price and that few Indian players do at scale. That is why LOHUM insists on being called a materials producer.

The part people get wrong is assuming a recycler’s revenue is stable. It is not. LOHUM sells commodities, so its top line moves with global lithium, nickel and cobalt prices as much as with the tonnage it processes. To manage that, the company has published its own DETX battery material price index, a sign of how central price discovery is to the business.

The numbers

Revenue has compounded fast off a small base, and the company has stayed narrowly profitable throughout, unusual for capital-heavy manufacturing.

Sources: FY22-FY24 revenue and FY23-FY24 profit from Entrackr and startuprise, citing MCA filings; FY25 revenue (₹835 crore, up 57.8%) and profit (₹33 crore) from startup data trackers based on MCA filings. Two points worth flagging. First, the profit is thin: ₹33 crore on ₹835 crore is a net margin of roughly 4%, which is what you would expect from a commodity-linked business, not a software one. Second, one widely indexed datalabs entry lists an FY24 revenue figure of over ₹4,300 crore; that is inconsistent with every primary report and with the company’s own capacity, so it has been treated as a data error and excluded here.

Where the money comes from

The revenue split is the surprise. Despite the recycling label, the metals-and-materials side carries the business:

• By activity: roughly 80% of revenue comes from recycling and refined materials, and about 20% from first-life 2- and 3-wheeler batteries (Business India, company-stated).
• By capacity and geography: LOHUM has said it runs about 5 GWh a year of recycling capacity across Greater Noida and Gujarat, with plans to reach 25-30 GWh by 2027 and new facilities in southern India (Autocar Professional, company-stated).
• Increasingly international: in 2024 LOHUM tied up with US firms ReElement Technologies and American Metals LLC for a 15.5 GWh facility in the United States, and it has a joint venture with the UAE’s Ministry of Energy and BEEAH for that country’s first EV battery recycling plant. Clients named by management include Glencore and Samsung.

The market-position claim to treat with care is that LOHUM holds about 70% of India’s lithium-ion battery recycling. That figure is company-stated and repeated across interviews and trade press; it is plausible given how few players refine black mass domestically, but it is not an independently audited market-share number, so it is best read as a claim rather than a measured fact.

The risks

The risks here are concrete and mostly structural, not reputational.

• Commodity price exposure. LOHUM sells recovered metals at market prices. Lithium prices collapsed sharply in 2024, with the average US lithium carbonate contract price falling about 66% to roughly $14,000 per tonne (USGS). When the metals you recover are worth less, the spread between feedstock cost and sale price compresses, and a business on a ~4% net margin has little cushion.
• Feedstock supply. The volume of genuinely end-of-life EV batteries in India is still building, because large-scale EV adoption is recent. A recycler that has expanded capacity to 5 GWh and aims for 25-30 GWh needs a reliable, growing stream of scrap to keep those plants utilised; thin feedstock means idle, expensive assets.
• Competition and China dependence. India’s battery-recycling market is filling up, with rivals such as Attero and others chasing the same scrap and the same EPR-driven demand. Globally, China dominates cathode refining, so LOHUM competes against incumbents with far greater scale and lower costs, even as it positions itself as a supply-chain alternative outside China.

A quieter risk is regulatory dependence. Much of the demand for compliant recycling is created by India’s Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022, which impose Extended Producer Responsibility on battery makers. That is a tailwind today, but it also means a chunk of the market rests on how strictly those rules are enforced.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from LOHUM is about where you choose to stand in a value chain. It would have been easier to be a scrap collector, and far harder to be a refiner, and LOHUM chose the harder position precisely because that is where the margin and the moat live. By engineering its own plants and refining black mass at home, it turned a waste-handling job into a critical-minerals business at exactly the moment India started worrying about importing those minerals. The caution attached to the lesson is just as important: when your product is a commodity, discipline in the good years matters, because the price of what you sell can fall faster than the volume you process can rise.

Frequently asked questions

What does LOHUM Cleantech actually do?

It recycles lithium-ion batteries and refines the recovered lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese into cathode-grade raw materials, repurposes still-usable batteries into second-life storage packs, and makes a smaller volume of first-life packs for electric 2- and 3-wheelers.

Who founded LOHUM and when?

LOHUM Cleantech Private Limited was founded in 2018 by Rajat Verma, who is Founder and CEO. Startup databases also list Gazanfar Safvi and Justin Lemmon as co-founders. It is based in Greater Noida.

How much money has LOHUM raised?

Reported rounds include a $7 million Series A (2021), a Series B of about $37.5 million across two tranches led by Baring Private Equity and Singularity Growth (2023-2024), a ~$15 million pre-Series C led by Growth I9 (2025) and a ₹230 crore investment from Ambit GPC’s Poonawalla Vision Fund (2026). Crunchbase and Tracxn put cumulative funding at around $135 million.

Is LOHUM profitable?

Yes, narrowly. It reported a profit after tax of about ₹33 crore on revenue of ₹835 crore in FY25, a net margin of roughly 4%, consistent with a commodity-linked materials business.

Is LOHUM going to have an IPO?

The company remains private, and management has said it is targeting a public listing by 2027, with reports of a pre-IPO round of around ₹1,000 crore. No prospectus has been filed at the time of writing.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Battery tech startup Lohum raises $23 Mn in ongoing Series B” (February 2024)
• Entrackr, “Battery tech startup Lohum raises $14.5 Mn more in Series B” (March 2024)
• Entrackr, “Battery tech startup LOHUM to begin pre-series C with $15 Mn” (2025)
• Startuprise, “LOHUM raises INR 131.4 crore pre-Series C round led by Growth I9 Opportunity LLP” (November 2025)
• Business India, “Lohum Cleantech’s green mission” (corporate report, 2024)
• Autocar Professional, “Lohum to Scale Up Capacity by 5X in 3 Years” (2025)
• EVreporter, “Chat with Rajat Verma, Founder & CEO, Lohum” (interview)
• Energetica India / Renewable Watch, “Ambit GPC invests Rs 2.3 billion in Lohum Cleantech” (July 2026)
• IPO Central, “LOHUM Set To Raise INR 1,000 Cr In Pre-IPO Round Ahead Of 2026 Listing” (2026)
• Inc42, thekredible and affluense.ai company financial profiles (FY24-FY25, based on MCA filings)
• Crunchbase and Tracxn company profiles (funding and investor data, 2026)
• U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries: Lithium (2025)
• Battery Waste Management Rules, 2022 (Government of India)

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.