SiTration, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spinoff developing separation processes for materials extraction, has raised $2.35 million in pre-seed funding led by Azolla Ventures with participation from the MIT-affiliated E14 Fund.
The funding will enable SiTration to accelerate hiring and ramp up development of its technology that recovers materials from used lithium-ion batteries.
SiTration’s filtration membrane technology can potentially eliminate the need for energy- and resource-intensive chemical and thermal separation methods used for the extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries.
Brendan Smith, co-founder and CEO of SiTration, who invented the technology during his PhD research at MIT and launched SiTration as an Activate Fellow, said that by replacing the chemical and thermal separation methods used in battery recycling they hoped to minimise impact and maximise circularity of lithium-ion battery critical materials.