R3 Lithium, a U.S. company that recovers lithium carbonate from recycled battery materials, has raised $15 million in Series A funding and begun operations at its lithium carbonate recovery facility in Covington, Georgia.

Integral GlobalTech Partners, TDK Ventures, and Axial Partners participated in the funding round.

The company acquired the 154,000-square-foot facility in July 2026 and retained the leadership team that demonstrated commercial-scale recycled lithium production there in 2025.

According to R3 Lithium, the facility’s production line previously produced lithium carbonate with 99% purity using 100% recycled content on a commercial scale. The company plans to use the new funding to upgrade the existing lithium carbonate production line.

“The U.S. has spent years discussing critical mineral independence while the vast majority of lithium processing has remained overseas,” said Linh Austin, President and CEO at R3 Lithium. “R3 Lithium is here today, with a proven facility that has already produced the product, the team that made it happen, and the capital needed to upgrade the line and keep it running, at commercial scale. R3 Lithium is setting a new pace for domestic lithium production, starting now.”

R3 Lithium said it will recover, refine, and return lithium carbonate to the domestic battery supply chain through a calciner-based crystallization and water-based precipitation process that extracts lithium directly from recycled black mass on a single site, without primary mining or non-domestic refining. The recovered lithium carbonate is intended for battery supply chains serving energy storage, defense applications, electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and other markets.

The Covington plant has 30,000 metric tons of battery shredding capacity and a lithium carbonate production line with an annual capacity of 2,500 metric tons. The site also has space allocated for another 2,500 metric tons lithium carbonate production line.

According to Mercom’s recently released 1H 2026 Funding and M&A for Energy Storage report, VC funding for energy storage companies in 1H 2026 totaled $1.6 billion across 51 deals, representing a 6% YoY decline compared to the $1.7 billion raised across 36 deals in 1H 2025.

In April 2026, Renewable Metals, an Australia-based lithium-ion battery recycling company, secured AU$12 million (~$8.6 million) in an oversubscribed Series A funding round. The funding increased from an initial AU$8 million (~$5.7 million) target, bringing the company’s total funding to over AU$38 million (~$27 million) since inception.