Metastable Materials: Building Circularity for India's Critical Minerals
One idea increasingly defines how we approach deep tech: taken together, our portfolio reflects a full-stack view of an opportunity — not just the headline technology, but the supply chain underneath it.
Electric mobility is a good example. Alongside higher-profile bets on electric motorcycles and air taxis, we've built equal conviction in the less visible infrastructure — the metallurgy, materials, and processing capacity — that the entire value chain depends on.
Metastable Materials, based in Bengaluru, is one such company reshaping that infrastructure. It treats spent lithium-ion cells not as waste but as high-grade ore, and it has built a processing pathway around that premise that looks resilient and, on the numbers so far, scalable.
Founders Shubham Vishvakarma and Manikumar Uppala deliberately avoided the two dominant recycling routes — pyrometallurgical smelting and hydrometallurgical acid leaching. Instead, they and their team developed a patented Integrated Carbothermal Reduction (ICR) process, paired with physical mineral beneficiation.
The mechanics matter because they explain the economics. ICR uses graphite already present inside spent cells as the reducing agent, so the process needs no external chemical inputs. Beneficiation then separates the constituent metals by mechanical, thermal, and magnetic properties rather than acid baths — bringing water consumption down to roughly three litres per kilogram of waste processed. Because no commercial machinery existed for this sequence, the team designed and built its own processing equipment in-house, including custom crystallizers for lithium carbonate.
The resulting numbers are a large part of why we backed the company: a 60 percent reduction in capital expenditure and a 40 percent reduction in operating costs relative to industry benchmarks, with recovery rates above 90 percent for target metals at market-ready purity.
The push behind this is structural, not cyclical. Western economies and other industrial powers are racing to reduce dependence on China's dominance of refined lithium, cobalt, and nickel. India's position is more acute — the country is close to fully import-dependent for cell materials even as domestic EV adoption accelerates. The Battery Waste Management Rules of 2022 respond to this by mandating 90 percent metal recovery by 2027, a regulatory floor that recyclers will need real process economics, not just compliance spend, to meet profitably.
Analysts project India's domestic battery recycling market will reach $1 billion by 2030, on the back of roughly 128 gigawatt-hours in annual recycling volume. For automotive OEMs facing Extended Producer Responsibility mandates and Scope 3 carbon reporting, sourcing low-carbon secondary metals is moving from a sustainability talking point to a balance-sheet requirement.
That shift lines up with Metastable's operating thesis in a way worth noting, because it cuts against a common assumption in the space: the company isn't chasing closed-loop, single-customer circularity. It's optimizing for market liquidity instead.
“We thought that it may not be about the circularity of the product, it may be about the circularity of the metals,” Shubham says, on the Speciale Focus podcast.
“Like get the lithium out, get the nickel out, get the cobalt out, offer it to the market as sustainable raw materials, offer it to the people and let them make what they want to make from it,” he adds.
Metastable has validated that thesis operationally, not just conceptually: pilot operations are running, and the company has vendor registration across domestic glass, steel, and foundry buyers. Its primary Bengaluru facility currently runs at a nameplate capacity of five tonnes per day — about 1,500 metric tonnes annually — processing spent cells into standard commodity forms benchmarked against exchanges like the London Metal Exchange.
The next test is scale. International commodity traders are asking for container-load volume commitments Metastable can't yet meet, so the company is working toward a seven-to-eightfold capacity increase, to 20–24 tonnes per day, while scouting expansion sites across Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Maharashtra. That's a genuine execution question — process economics that hold at five tonnes a day have to hold at twenty-plus, across new sites and potentially different feedstock mixes — and it's the one we're watching most closely as the company scales.
For early-stage deep-tech investors, Metastable is a useful case study in what disciplined metallurgical engineering can do for unit economics: building hardware in-house, keeping the capital structure conservative, and selling into an open commodity market rather than a narrow closed loop. If the scale-up holds, the company is well positioned to be a durable piece of India's advanced manufacturing base — and, over time, a contributor to global clean energy supply chains.
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