Circular Materials raises €11.8M to recover critical metals from industrial wastewater at industrial scale

Circular Materials (Cadoneghe, Padua) has secured €11.8 million via a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) financing instrument. CDP Venture Capital leads the round, joined by the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, EIT RawMaterials, 360 Capital, Corbites, and Lumar S.r.l. No equity stage label is assigned to a SAFE instrument. The announcement was made 21 July 2026.

Founded in 2019 by Andrea Campiglio, Circular Materials has built SWaP™ — a proprietary electrochemical technology platform that recovers dissolved metals from the wastewater generated by industrial processes. Those recovered materials are reintroduced into industrial supply chains as secondary raw materials. CEO Marco Bersani leads the commercial operation.

The resource dependency it targets

Europe imports between 85% and 98% of its critical raw materials — lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements — from non-European sources, a supply chain vulnerability the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act is actively trying to reduce. The conventional supply-side response focuses on opening new European mines or diversifying primary supply geographies. Circular Materials takes a different entry point: the metals are already present in the wastewater that steel mills, battery manufacturers, electronics plants, and chemical processors discharge as a compliance cost rather than treat as a revenue source.

SWaP™'s electrochemical process is designed to extract those metals at commercially viable concentrations, returning cleaned water and recovered metal to usable industrial form. The company is expanding its operational capacity by building a new industrial recovery hub in Ferrara, adding to existing sites near Padua.

The material specification question is not trivial. Battery-grade lithium or cobalt has tolerance specifications that leave little room for impurity. Whether SWaP™ can achieve the purity grades industrial supply chains require — consistently, at throughput levels that move the needle on European self-sufficiency — is the technical proof of concept the round funds.

SAFE financing and a public-backed syndicate

The SAFE structure defers the valuation and dilution question to a future equity round, an instrument more common in US early-stage contexts than in European venture. That structural choice, alongside an investor mix that leans heavily toward mission-aligned and public-adjacent capital — CDP Venture Capital (Italy's development finance institution), the EIC Fund (European Commission-backed), and EIT RawMaterials (European Knowledge and Innovation Community) — signals that this round's primary purpose is technology validation and capacity expansion rather than a commercial scale-up push.

360 Capital is the conventional VC outlier in the syndicate. Its participation alongside three public or mission-oriented investors suggests that at least one financial backer finds the commercial thesis credible independently of the policy rationale. Whether that distinction matters — or whether all six investors are effectively sharing the same thesis about European critical materials policy creating a protected market for proven domestic alternatives — will be clearer once the Ferrara hub is operational and producing data.