In a stunning demonstration of investor interest in magnet recycling, Cyclic Materials of Toronto has successfully closed an oversubscribed $53 million Series B equity round, bringing the company’s total equity raised to $83 million. Cyclic plans to deploy the capital to fast-track its international growth by building rare earth recycling infrastructure in North America and Europe and to grow its fledgling team.
The funding round was led by ArcTern Ventures and supported by new investors BDC Capital’s Climate Tech Fund, Hitachi Ventures, Zero Infinity Partners, Climate Investment, and Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund. Existing investors Fifth Wall, BMW i Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, and Planetary Technologies also participated in the round.
“This funding underscores the confidence in our ability to create the circular economy for rare earths needed for the clean energy transition,” said Ahmad Ghahreman, CEO and co-founder. “Not only is our technology essential for supporting sustainable domestic production of rare earths, but it will also play a critical role in re-establishing North American and European leadership in the rare earths industry.”
“We seek to partner with visionary founders and technology companies that share our commitment to tackling sustainability challenges with innovative solutions,” said Marc Faucher, managing partner at ArcTern Ventures. “Cyclic Materials’ mission-driven approach to the circular economy combined with its proprietary rare earth metals recycling processes offers a scalable decarbonization solution that contributes to the abatement of greenhouse gas emissions.”
The Series B funding follows a USD $3.6 million grant award from Natural Resources Canada that supports the continued operation of Cyclic Materials’ commercial demonstration facility (Hub100) for producing high-purity REEs from recycled magnet material and preparing for scaling to larger operations. These recent public and private investments demonstrate the surging interest in funding companies with technology proven to address climate change and sustainable development.
“The opportunity to invest in companies like Cyclic Materials at this stage of development and scaling is scarce,” said Tobias Jahn, partner at Hitachi Ventures. “We are impressed with their high growth potential, strong leadership, proprietary extraction processes from electronic and industrial waste, and commitment to overcoming the limited availability of rare earth elements essential for various technologies in today’s electrification era.”
Established in 2021, Cyclic’s proprietary technologies are capable of economically and sustainably recovering critical raw materials from end-of-life electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, MRI machines and data center electronic waste. Over the past year, the company has forged strategic partnerships with key industry leaders such as Solvay, Vattenfall, Synetiq, and Vacuumschmelze to recycle magnets containing rare earth elements and establish a circular supply chain.
In 2023, Cyclic commissioned a commercial demonstration facility of the first stage of its process to recover rare earth magnets from end-of-life materials using its Mag-Cycle process. Earlier this year, it opened a second commercial demonstration facility, this one for the second stage of its process, in Kingston, Ontario where mixed rare earth oxide is produced using its hydrometallurgical technology, called REEPure. For more info, see other articles in Magnetics Magazine and visit www.cyclicmaterials.earth.
