Posh raises $3.8M to automate EV battery recycling

Posh, an electric vehicle battery recycler based in California's Silicon Valley, has announced it had raised $3.8 million in seed funding. The Bay Area startup automates electric vehicle (EV) battery recycling to build sustainable energy storage solutions.  

"There will be around 12 million tons of batteries retiring from EVs between now and 2030,” says Wesley Zheng, CEO and co-founder of Posh “Most of these batteries have 80 percent capacity unused and thousands of dollars worth of precious metals. Today these retired batteries are disassembled almost 100 percent manually before they are reused or shredded for recycling.”  

Posh says it hopes to change this by making battery disassembly fast, safe and scalable. So far, EV battery pack disassembly has been a manual and laborious process, exposing the workers to a great deal of fire and safety risks. One of the biggest challenges in scaling up the applications of end-of-life EV batteries is automating battery pack disassembly and grading. Traditional automation is suitable for preprogrammed, repetitive tasks in a highly structured environment.   

Retired EV battery packs have many product variants, with no common standards in battery pack design. Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Chung Hoang says developing flexible automation systems that can handle a large variety of packs and deal with uncertainties remains a significant bottleneck in expanding end-of-life EV battery use.   

"In order to build a fully scalable solution, we have to build a model that we can train to handle all types of batteries,” Hoang says.  

Along with Muse lead singer Matt Bellamy (through Helium-3 Ventures), investors include Y Combinator, Metaplanet, Outbound Capital, Starling Ventures, Uphonest Capital, Global Founders Capital and others.