VoltR raises €22M to industrialise second life lithium batteries

VoltR, the Angers-based battery remanufacturer, has secured a €22M financing package – €16M in equity from the SPI 2 fund, managed by Bpifrance under France 2030, and Decathlon PULSE, plus €6M in Première Usine grants – to take its second life lithium batteries to industrial scale.

The announcement went out through Bpifrance’s press office on 5 October 2026, and it is not a classic venture round: no Series letter, no US fund flying in, and more than a quarter of the package is not equity at all. For a company whose business is persuading used lithium cells to work a second shift, the structure of the financing is itself a pattern – one I keep seeing in European industrial deals this autumn. The news first, though.

Sixteen million in equity, six million to double a factory

The equity comes from two investors: the SPI 2 fund, which Bpifrance manages on behalf of the French State within the €54bn France 2030 programme, and Decathlon PULSE, the investment and innovation arm of the sporting goods retailer. Neither is designated lead, and the split between the two is not disclosed. The remaining €6M arrives as grants under Première Usine, the France 2030 scheme built to get first factories off the ground. The package follows a €4M seed closed in April 2024, per our fundraising records.

The money has a precise destination: the plant at Verrières-en-Anjou, outside Angers. VoltR says it will double the factory’s surface area, automate production, build an ICPE-classified storage site for incoming cells, and keep developing the diagnostics that decide which cell deserves a second life. “Within two years, we aim to increase our production capacity sixfold and double our workforce, creating about 40 jobs,” CEO Maxime Bleskine said in the announcement.

Used cells, second shifts: what VoltR actually sells

VoltR collects lithium battery cells at the end of their first life, tests each one’s remaining performance, and reassembles the good ones into new, eco-designed batteries built in France – for power tools, micromobility, home automation, smart cities and mobile storage. Bleskine’s shorthand in the announcement: a lithium cell that has finished its first life has not necessarily finished its industrial life.

The company has spent four years on the idea, by its own account, and employs about 40 people today. More than 20,000 of its batteries are already on the market – the proof of concept this round is meant to industrialise. That number is worth pausing on. Plenty of European circularity pitches stop at the pilot; VoltR put five figures of product into the field before raising its first industrial money.

A $4.7bn market growing at 25.5% a year

The second life battery market was worth USD 1.2bn in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 4.7bn by 2030, a 25.5% CAGR (MarketsandMarkets, December 2024). The driver is mechanical rather than speculative: every e-bike, scooter and cordless drill sold today is a used battery a few years from now, and a remanufactured cell undercuts a new one on both price and carbon.

Set against our own records, the round sits at the top of its European cohort. Libattion, the Swiss second life storage builder, raised a €14M Series A in June 2024; Spain’s BATTIA took an €8.15M grant from IDAE’s RENOCICLA programme, backed by NextGenerationEU, in September 2026. A €22M package for a roughly 40-person remanufacturer in Anjou is, by those standards, a statement.

When the state and a retailer sign the same deal

So what does this round signal? Start with who wrote it. The SPI fund exists to put the French State’s balance sheet behind factories, and its director Jean-Philippe Richard framed the deal as completing a sovereign battery value chain: cells get made, used and now remade without leaving the continent. Decathlon PULSE is the strategic half. A retailer whose shelves carry battery-powered bikes, scooters and tools has an obvious interest in where those packs go when they fade, and its CEO Franck Vigo called circularity central to future industrial models. One investor buys sovereignty, the other buys a supply chain – both are buying the same factory.

What we are seeing, deal after deal, is European industrial financing turning into a blend: equity plus grant, fund plus programme. BATTIA’s Spanish grant ran on NextGenerationEU; VoltR’s runs on France 2030. The good news is that the blend gets factories built that pure venture maths would not touch – the same week our records logged Wiremind’s €35M first round after twelve bootstrapped years, another reminder that French capital is learning patience. The open question is whether these companies can grow past the programmes that seeded them.

Watch three numbers at Verrières-en-Anjou between now and 2028: the sixfold capacity target, the 40 new hires, and the share of output landing in products you can actually buy. Twenty thousand batteries is a proof of concept. Six times that factory is an industrial bet – and Europe needs the boring, repeatable kind. Let’s see who makes circularity routine first.