American battery start-up Lyten has been in the news for its decision to buy most of bankrupt Swedish battery maker Northvolt. This move potentially offers a way back for the European company that was once seen as the region’s answer to rivals in Asia, especially in terms of the continent having its own electric vehicle battery ecosystem.
Lyten is currently developing lithium-sulphur cells as a cleaner alternative to lithium-ion, with backing from Stellantis, American engineering conglomerate Honeywell, and delivery services provider FedEx.
Analysts see Lyten’s latest move igniting revival hopes for European battery independence after Northvolt filed for bankruptcy in March 2025, making it one of Sweden’s largest corporate failures and sparking a frantic push to find a buyer.
Lyten now wants to restart the flagship Skelleftea plant in northern Sweden and resume deliveries of lithium-ion battery cells in 2026. In July, it acquired Northvolt’s energy storage business in Poland, Europe’s largest, and is targeting automotive, defence, and energy storage markets. As per Lyten CEO and co-founder Dan Cook, several of Northvolt’s former management will be joining Lyten, excluding founder and ex-CEO Peter Carlsson.
International Finance will explain in detail about Lyten, which recently secured more than USD 200 million in additional equity investment to support its acquisitions and expansion plans.
Unleashing Materials Disruption
Lyten specialises in “supermaterial applications,” unleashing extraordinary possibilities in humankind’s journey to net zero and beyond. The start-up’s flagship creation has been its “Lyten 3D Graphene,” a novel decarbonisation supermaterial with the potential to disrupt, transform, and enhance nearly every industry on Earth.
Lyten utilises supermaterials and relentless ingenuity to make “Net Zero” a reality, without compromising performance, profitability, customer experience, and economic growth in developing economies.
As per Keith Norman, Lyten’s Chief Sustainability Officer, to fulfil Lyten’s vision of an “equitable net zero world,” the start-up needs to deliver gigaton CO2 reduction at massive global scale. That will take more than just cleaner products, as people need better-performing products that make simple economic sense and are cleaner.
Lyten’s focus today is on the highest-emitting, hardest-to-abate industries. The start-up claims its supermaterials are highly tunable, which will help it to work closely with leaders from these industries to deliver the specific performance enhancements required to create better applications.
Meet Lyten’s 3D Graphene
In every industry, material limitations act as a barrier to reducing emissions while maintaining profitability. Lyten 3D Graphene acts as a game-changer here, by acting as a decarbonisation multiplier that makes an impact at every level. From the permanent sequestering of carbon in the making of Lyten 3D Graphene, to cleaner product manufacturing, to the expanding decarbonisation impact over time—it’s a win-win-win: for customers, economy, and planet.
The product offers unique resistive, capacitive, inductive, structural, and energy-absorbing properties that can be infinitely tuned to deliver profound results. Lyten creates its 3D Graphene by converting greenhouse gases into solid carbon and hydrogen gas. While the hydrogen gas will be captured for re-use as a clean fuel, the carbon gets permanently sequestered in the form of a three-dimensional supermaterial.
Since the technology is tunable, it can be engineered at the atomic level to bond with other elements on the periodic table. This can optimise thermal and electrical properties, or customise porosity to improve strength and stiffness, decrease weight, and much more.
Powered by Lyten 3D Graphene, the start-up’s “Lithium-Sulphur Batteries” are now serving as the heart of high-performance UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles). These batteries act as the ultra-lightweight propulsion to enable longer flights and heavier payloads, while being fully compliant with the NDAA (National Defence Authorisation Act), as the component is fully US-sourced and American-manufactured, keeping out foreign-controlled minerals such as nickel, manganese, cobalt, or graphite from the production process.
Lithium-Sulfur’s performance is perfect to electrify anything that moves. Lyten has begun the multi-year qualification process for electric vehicles, trucks, delivery vehicles, and aviation, apart from meeting near-term delivery targets of commercial-ready batteries for drones, satellites, defence applications, micromobility, and mobile equipment. Lyten is betting big on Lithium-Sulphur as the sulphur cathode and lithium-metal anode have the potential to hold multiple times the energy density of current lithium-ion batteries.
Lyten uses the above-mentioned potential to build a practical battery without heavy minerals like nickel, cobalt, graphite, or iron and phosphorus. The result is up to 50% weight reduction vs NMC and up to 75% weight reduction vs LFP. While it’s impossible to buy a lithium-ion battery whose raw materials don’t go through China, Lyten is trying to eliminate the challenge, instead of trying to rebuild the mining and processing supply chain.
“Lyten Lithium-Sulphur is the world leader in localised sourcing. We are nearly complete in building an entirely local supply chain in the US. Next up is the European Union, then the rest of the world. The world can’t wait for a new chemistry requiring completely new manufacturing. The world is building gigafactories now. Lyten Li-S can be manufactured on the same equipment lines that fill gigafactories today. Well… almost. First, we can eliminate some of the equipment because we don’t need it,” the start-up noted.
Based on the above principle, Lyten converted its Lithium-Sulfur’s automated pilot line in California’s San Jose from a lithium-ion line in March 2025. That pilot line has since then ramped up to more than 90% yields for both pouch and cylindrical cells.
The start-up sees the removal of mined minerals from its battery production process as a great start. It is now eyeing ramping up things further by factoring in 3D Graphene, sourced by sequestering carbon from methane. It will end up resulting in the product powering industrial operations through renewables, ensuring the lowest carbon footprint in the process.
3D Printer Filament And More
Lyten’s “3D Printer Filament” is all about infusing elements like strength, speed, quality, and ease of use when it comes to high-performance 3D printing. The start-up calls the product the marriage between materials science and additive manufacturing, as it remarked, “Powered by Lyten 3D Graphene, our filament is engineered to push the boundaries of what’s possible with 3D printing.”
This is not just another carbon fiber-reinforced nylon—it’s a reimagined composite built with Lyten 3D Graphene, delivering unmatched print speed, quality, strength, and mechanical performance.
Powered by a proprietary formula that enhances the synergy between polymer and fiber, the manufacturers (from fields like consumer electronics, defence, drones, mobility, and motorsport) using 3D printer filament can now print faster, stronger, and with greater precision and design freedom than ever before, without sacrificing print quality or reliability.
The tool prints 20% faster than leading Nylon-CF brands, with fewer slowdowns, something which makes the tool perfect for production environments, rapid prototyping, or time-sensitive builds—functions that require increased productivity and capacity. The 3D printer filament has reportedly outperformed top competitors in blind surface quality tests, in terms of delivering high-resolution detail, with better finish, and consistent results.
Next, we have Lyten’s “3D Graphene Composite Systems,” representing high-performance composite materials (like plastic), that come in handy for applications like ultra-lightweight aircraft, drones, and vehicles.
“Composite materials make up a massive portion of our infrastructure. With our 3D Graphene, polymers and composites can be made lighter, stronger, and more sustainable. These reinforced materials can be applied across countless applications, enabling even the highest-emitting industries on the planet to work towards achieving net zero without compromising performance, profitability, or customer experience. Lyten has successfully reduced weight and plastic usage by more than 50% in certain applications that can be used in the mobility, aviation, and supply chain industries. This is only the beginning of our journey to a stronger, more sustainable material world,” the start-up added.
Let’s conclude with Lyten’s “3D Graphene IoT Sensing Platform,” which consists of paper-thin, dime-sized, electronics-free sensors that can be embedded into nearly any material on Earth. These sensors have non-invasive biosensing, which has the potential to transform healthcare.