Site icon The Invincible India

Startup Deep Dive : BatX Energies — how a six-month battery delay turned into a Rs 105 crore bet

The Invincible India
The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for BatX Energies.

Utkarsh Singh and Vikrant Singh’s college racing team lost its shot at the Baja SAE India competition in 2017 because a single lithium-ion battery, ordered from an overseas supplier, took six months to arrive. The delay convinced the two BML Munjal University engineering students that India had no real domestic answer for the raw materials locked inside a battery pack. Out of that frustration grew BatX Energies, a Gurugram-based recycler that says it has now processed 220 million batteries and, in July 2026, closed a ₹105 crore ($11 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) Series A round led by IvyCap Ventures.

Yet the same public record that shows that funding also shows a business still finding its financial footing: BatX Energies booked ₹23.53 crore (about $2.45 million) in revenue for the year ended 31 March 2024, a figure smaller than several of the individual funding rounds that came before and after it, according to filings compiled by corporate-data platform TheCompanyCheck. That gap — between a scaling growth story and a still-thin topline — runs through nearly every chapter of the company’s six years, from a pandemic-era founding to a hazardous-waste reclassification that could remake its core supply chain overnight.

Quick facts

Company BatX Energies Private Limited
Founded 7 July 2020, Gurugram, Haryana (incorporation date, MCA records)
Founders Utkarsh Singh (Co-founder and CEO), Vikrant Singh (Co-founder and CTO)
Businesses Lithium-ion battery recycling, critical mineral (lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite) recovery, black mass and Cathode Active Material production, second-life battery repurposing
Latest FY revenue ₹23.53 crore for FY24 (year ended 31 March 2024), up 7.42% year-on-year, as per MCA filings compiled by TheCompanyCheck (data updated 15 January 2026)
Latest FY profit/loss Not disclosed in the public filings accessed for this piece
Listed Private (unlisted)
Market value / last valuation Not publicly disclosed; raised ₹105 crore in a Series A round at an undisclosed valuation (July 2026)
Key shareholders / CEO Utkarsh Singh and Vikrant Singh (founders); Zephyr Peacock holds roughly a 9.9% stake, per data platform Tracxn cited by YourStory (August 2024); IvyCap Ventures leads the latest round

What they do

BatX Energies collects lithium-ion batteries that have reached the end of their working life — from electric vehicles, consumer electronics, telecom towers and battery-manufacturing rejects — and breaks them down to recover the metals inside: lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite. It sells three things from that process, according to a YourStory account of the business (14 August 2024): black mass (the mixed-metal powder produced when a battery is shredded), refined metals extracted from that black mass, and secondary by-products such as high-grade plastic and aluminium sold on to other recyclers. Buyers include electric-vehicle makers, telecom operators and companies in pharmaceuticals, electroplating and fertilisers that use the recovered metals as industrial inputs. Batteries that still hold usable charge are instead repurposed into second-life products such as solar EV chargers and inverters rather than being shredded.

The origin

Singh and Singh were engineering students at BML Munjal University in Haryana when they signed up to build an electric car for the Baja SAE India student racing competition in 2017 — the year the organisers stopped allowing petrol-engine entries. Sourcing a lithium-ion battery domestically proved impossible, so the team turned to a vendor who imported one from Korea. “For six months they kept delaying the delivery of this battery, and eventually, we couldn’t participate in the competition,” Utkarsh Singh later told The Better India (1 March 2024). “Frustrated by this outcome, Vikrant and I began discussing why these Li-ion batteries aren’t being made in India.” The answer, they found, was that the raw materials — lithium, cobalt and nickel — were not mined or processed domestically either, so even a locally assembled cell would still depend on imports. That single realisation, rather than any grand cleantech thesis, is the seed BatX Energies grew from.

The struggle years

The first idea the pair chased was not recycling at all. After college, they tried building an indigenous lithium-ion battery cell to remove India’s dependence on imported packs, according to The Better India’s account of the founding story. It did not solve the underlying problem: even a cell built in India still needed lithium, cobalt and nickel sourced from abroad. Realising that recycling old batteries for those same metals was both a bigger and a more solvable opportunity than manufacturing new cells, the two pivoted, and incorporated BatX Energies on 7 July 2020 — in the middle of India’s pandemic lockdowns, with capital markets closed to most first-time hardware founders. Early funding reflected that caution: BatX raised just $1.96 million in total across two separate rounds in 2021 and 2022, according to a 20 December 2023 report on trade publication EVreporter. The company’s first Black Mass production line came up in the Sikandrabad industrial area near Bulandshahr, Uttar Pradesh, in late 2022, and was then run through a 21-month industrial pilot starting mid-2023 before the business felt ready to build a full commercial critical-minerals plant — a long, unglamorous stretch of process engineering rather than a single dramatic setback, but one that kept the company pre-revenue at any meaningful scale for nearly four years after incorporation.

The turning point

Two events, eleven months apart, mark the shift from pilot-scale recycler to a company with anchor customers and growth capital. In July 2025, Vietnamese automaker VinFast signed BatX to handle high-voltage battery recycling, material recovery and repurposing for its Indian factory and after-sales network, as VinFast prepared to scale annual EV production in India to as much as 150,000 units and begin exporting to the Middle East and Africa, Inc42 reported (11 July 2025) — at the time, BatX was targeting a $20 million Series A within six months. That round eventually closed a year later, in July 2026, at ₹105 crore ($11 million) led by IvyCap Ventures, with existing backers Zephyr Peacock, Mankind Pharma Family Office, Excel Industries Family Office and JITO returning, per EVreporter (2 July 2026). The contrast is stark: before, a company running a single Uttar Pradesh hub on roughly $7 million of lifetime funding; after, one with four granted patents, a battery-shredding and hydrometallurgy capacity of 5,000 tonnes a year each, a micro-facility collection network with combined capacity above 20,000 tonnes a year, and a co-founder telling reporters BatX was “positioned to scale what we have successfully built in India to global markets.”

The money behind it

How it makes money

BatX buys spent batteries, pays more for packs with more residual charge left in them, then runs them through an in-house “zero-waste, zero-emission” hydro-electro process to separate the casing, plastics and metals. According to Utkarsh Singh’s account to YourStory, the company’s edge is yield and purity rather than price: it says it recovers about 95% of the lithium and nickel in a battery, against 85-87% for rivals, and produces black mass with less than 1% impurities. A separate report on the company’s earlier funding round cites 99.95%-pure lithium, nickel and cobalt extracted from that black mass (Entrackr, 20 December 2023). Margin sits in that gap between input cost and output purity: because BatX has built its own machinery rather than importing plant, and does not outsource any stage of the chemistry, it captures value at each step — shredding, black mass, refined metal — instead of splitting it with a processor further down the chain.

The numbers

BatX Energies is privately held, and only one year of audited revenue is visible in the free layer of its Ministry of Corporate Affairs filings. Profit or loss for any year was locked behind a paid report at every data provider checked for this piece, so it is left out rather than estimated.

Metric (₹ crore) FY23 FY24 FY29 (company target)
Revenue ~21.9 (implied by FY24 growth rate) 23.53 (confirmed, MCA filing) ~110 (CEO’s 5-year target, stated August 2024)
Net profit/loss Not disclosed Not disclosed Not stated

Where the money comes from

BatX’s feedstock and its customer base both run wider than a single-city Indian recycler’s usually do.

The risks

The takeaway

BatX Energies was not founded to fight climate change in the abstract; it was founded because two students could not get hold of a battery in time for a race. That is arguably the most useful thing about the company’s story: the six-month wait for an imported cell taught its founders more about India’s real supply-chain gap than any market report could have, and the business they built to close that one gap for themselves ended up being a more durable idea than the racing car ever was. The broader lesson travels well beyond battery recycling — the businesses worth building are often hiding inside a founder’s own unsolved logistics problem, not in a slide deck about a trillion-dollar market.

Frequently asked questions

What does BatX Energies actually do?

It recycles end-of-life lithium-ion batteries and battery-manufacturing scrap to recover lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese and graphite, which it sells as black mass, refined metals and eventually Cathode Active Material to battery makers and industrial buyers, while repurposing still-usable cells into second-life products.

Who founded BatX Energies and when?

Utkarsh Singh and Vikrant Singh, engineering students at BML Munjal University, incorporated the company on 7 July 2020 in Gurugram, after an idea that began with a delayed battery import for a 2017 college racing project.

How much funding has BatX Energies raised?

Roughly $18 million across three disclosed rounds: $1.96 million over two rounds in 2021-22, $5 million in a December 2023 pre-Series A led by Zephyr Peacock, and ₹105 crore (about $11 million) in a July 2026 Series A led by IvyCap Ventures. No valuation has been publicly disclosed for any round.

Is BatX Energies profitable?

That is not publicly known. Its FY24 revenue was ₹23.53 crore, up 7.42% year-on-year per MCA filings compiled by TheCompanyCheck, but profit-or-loss figures were not visible in the public filings accessed for this piece.

Who are BatX Energies’ main competitors?

India’s lithium-ion battery recycling market also includes larger, longer-established players such as Lohum Cleantech (founded 2018) and Attero Recycling (founded 2007), both of which have signed deals with automakers for battery recycling and material recovery.

Sources

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

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

Exit mobile version