Osborne Clarke advises battery recycling start-up Cylib on seed funding

Osborne Clarke has advised Cylib GmbH, a start-up for holistic battery recycling recently spun out of RWTH Aachen University, on its EUR 3.6 million seed funding round. 

At the heart of Cylib's future business model is a proprietary, sustainable recycling process that the start-up claims is capable of recovering all materials from a lithium-ion battery with unprecedented efficiency and in an environmentally friendly manner. On its website, the start-up speaks of a recycling efficiency of over 90 percent. Cylib was founded by Lilian Schwich, Paul Sabarny and Gideon Schwich. Lilian Schwich and Paul Sabarny both worked at the IME, a teaching and research institute at RWTH Aachen University, where they helped establish the battery recycling group. 

With the seed capital from this financing round, Cylib is now planning to set up a pilot factory in Aachen to industrialise the process, which has been developed over several years, together with partners from different sectors. The investors in the seed round include Vsquared Ventures and Speedinvest, as well as Lawrence Leuschner from Blue Impact Ventures (also CEO of Tier Mobility), Lieferando founder Kai Hansen, Customcells founders Torge Thönnessen and Leopold König, Silexica founder Maximilian Odendahl and Karim Jalbout, CPO at Lilium.

The team advising Cylib consisted under the lead of Fabian Mimberg and the partner responsibility of Nicolas Gabrysch (both corporate / venture capital) of Dr Andrea Schmoll, Dr Jonas Völkel (both IP) and Konstantin Axnick (labour law).