VoltR raises €22M to build France's first industrial battery remanufacturing facility

VoltR (Verrières-en-Anjou, Maine-et-Loire) has raised €22 million to open France's first industrial facility for second-life lithium-ion batteries. The round combines €16 million in equity from SPI 2 Fund (Bpifrance's France 2030 strategic investment vehicle, under the "Première Usine" programme) and Decathlon PULSE, plus €6 million in government grants from France 2030. The stage is unstated; VoltR's prior round was a €4M Seed in April 2024.

Co-founded in 2022 by Alban Regnier, François Mallet, Thibaud Maufront, and Maxime Bleskine (CEO), VoltR collects used EV and e-mobility battery packs, tests and sorts cells by remaining capacity, and remanufactures them into standardised modules for second-life applications — stationary storage, e-cargo, light transport.

The remanufacturing opportunity

The lifecycle arithmetic of lithium-ion batteries creates a gap that first-life manufacturers and recyclers both underserve. A battery pack is retired from an EV application when it falls below roughly 70-80% of its original capacity — at which point it still holds substantial energy and can serve lower-intensity uses for years. The current default is early recycling, which is energy-intensive, destroys residual value, and puts pressure on raw material supply chains that are already tight for cobalt, lithium, and manganese.

VoltR's model inserts a remanufacturing step before recycling: cells are tested to a proprietary diagnostic protocol, sorted by degradation profile, and repacked into modules that carry a traceable provenance and a defined warranty. The output is a standardised second-life product rather than a pile of sorted cells with unpredictable performance — which is what industrial buyers (grid operators, logistics fleets, e-mobility platforms) actually need to integrate batteries at scale.

The Première Usine and what it needs to prove

SPI 2's involvement places VoltR inside France's industrial reindustrialisation programme. The "Première Usine" designation — first industrial facility — comes with funding but also with accountability: the facility must prove that French remanufacturing can compete on quality and cost with cheaper alternative sourcing from Asian second-life markets.

Decathlon PULSE's participation is strategically coherent: Decathlon's growing e-bike and e-cargo product lines create both a natural collection stream for end-of-life battery packs and a potential anchor customer for remanufactured modules. "Notre usine va prouver que la seconde vie des batteries est industrialisable en France," said Bleskine.

The facility in Verrières-en-Anjou is expected to employ 60+ people by 2027. What the funding doesn't resolve: offtake agreements at volume, which require second-life buyers to accept VoltR's module specifications and warranty terms — a commercial step that will define whether the industrial model is viable beyond the France 2030 subsidy environment.