Ex-Tesla exec's Holyvolt raises $45 million for AI-driven battery R&D

Holyvolt, a battery R&D company led by Swedish founder and CEO Mathias Ingvarsson, has raised $45 million to build AI-driven battery research. Ingvarsson previously helped drive Tempur-Pedic's international expansion, both before and after its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, and ran its European business for six years after the listing.

The company is built around a large body of experimental data. Ingvarsson told Fortune that Holyvolt now operates as one merged company with Wildcat, whose test results were used to train AI models. Those models are wired back into the lab, so each round of real-world testing feeds the next.

Ingvarsson contrasts this with most AI-for-science startups, which begin with models and then look for data. Holyvolt came at it from the other direction, drawing on what he described as 20 years of the reinforcement learning "which AI needs to actually learn and build on." He called that approach very difficult to build, saying it takes "years and years and years."

He said the lab already works 10 times faster than conventional R&D, based on a case study completed with a customer. Holyvolt expects that figure to rise as the AI loop is closed further. "I'd go so far as to say that we have cracked the code on how to do it," he said.

The funding gives Holyvolt resources to pursue a model in which proprietary lab data, rather than algorithms alone, is the main competitive asset in AI-assisted materials research.