Battery Recycling: Building an Independent Investment Thesis

Nirvan began tracking battery recycling on his own time, with no deal or assignment driving it. The thesis started with a structural observation: the first cohort of EV batteries placed in vehicles over the past several years would reach end-of-life within the next few years, creating a large and growing supply of used batteries. India, as a country, lacked the infrastructure to handle that supply.

He mapped the full value chain. The first challenge is reverse logistics: collecting end-of-life batteries from OEMs and getting them to recyclers. The second is processing: shredding batteries into black mass, a mixture of all the materials inside a cell. The third, and most technically demanding, is extracting usable critical minerals from black mass, including lithium, cobalt, and nickel. This is where India's R&D gap is most acute.

The strategic importance of solving this, in Nirvan's view, goes beyond recycling. India currently has no domestic cell manufacturing capability. Battery packs are assembled locally, but the cells themselves are imported from China. If India can develop the ability to extract critical minerals from recycled batteries at scale, it creates the feedstock needed to eventually support domestic cell manufacturing, reducing dependence on Chinese imports.

He identified several startups working across the value chain and tracked their approaches to the reverse logistics and black mass processing problems. The thesis is ongoing and independent of any formal role.