CRITICAL MATERIALS
RECOVERY COMPANY
AraBat's biomass-driven recycling technologies recover lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths from batteries, capacitors, and magnet waste, replacing harsh chemicals with nothing more exotic than biomass. Up to 60% lower costs. Up to 50% lower CO₂ emissions. And zero SOx and NOx emissions by design.
We're the ones who use orange peels
to recycle electronics.
BIO BASED RECYCLING
FARMING THE CRITICAL MATERIALS OF THE FUTURE
Criticial materials scarcity is a chemistry and supply chain problem. We solve it with agriculture.
AraBat replaces the acids and industrial chemicals used in critical-materials recycling — reagents typically imported from a handful of concentrated foreign supply chains — with organic acids and plant by-products: orange peels, apple peels, artichoke leaves, grape pomace, sea algae, and other agricultural waste. We recover the lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths locked inside spent batteries and defective or end-of-life electronics.
Three ways our circular business model work with the industry.
TOLLING
PROCESSING SERVICES FOR MANUFACTURERS' OWN CRITICAL-MATERIALS SCRAP
Manufacturers send us their battery, capacitor, and electronics scrap; we process it through AraMet and return the recovered materials, charging a processing fee. You keep ownership from start to finish — no change to your supply chain, just a cheaper and cleaner way to close the loop.
MERCHANT
RECOVERY AND SALE OF HIGH-QUALITY CRITICAL MATERIALS
Our unique and innovative technologies recover critical materials with high strategic and commercial value — lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, rare earths — from end-of-life lithium batteries, capacitors, and other electronic matrices, which we sell directly. We're actively extending recovery to new feedstocks like magnets and semiconductors and waste streams beyond this list.
LICENSING
LICENSING OUR PATENTED BIO-BASED RECYCLING TECHNOLOGY
We license our technology "AraMet" to industrial partners who want to run the technology themselves in specific geographical regions, and we develop new applications and industrialization projects jointly — through Proof of Concept agreements, Joint Development Agreements, or Joint Ventures with qualified partners.
MISSION
THE FUTURE SHOULDN'T DEPEND ON WHO OWNS THE MINE
Lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare earths — the elements running every battery, every chip, every clean-energy system on the planet, as well as the materials for AI data centers — are refined today in a handful of places, using chemistry too dirty and too dangerous to build just anywhere.
We think that's insane. Not because it's unsustainable. Because it's fragile. A world this advanced shouldn't be one embargo away from losing the materials it runs on.
So we built a process that runs on orange peels instead of sulfuric acid — not as a compromise, as an upgrade. Cheaper. Safer. Buildable anywhere something grows: citrus groves in California, artichoke fields in Puglia, seaweed off the coast of Japan. The chemistry doesn't care which country it's in. Neither do we.
Give AraMet a farm nearby and a plant to run it in, and you no longer need a mine, a smelter, or anyone else's permission. That's not an environmental slogan. It's an industrial fact, and it's the one thing about the next decade of critical materials we intend to make true everywhere at once.
WE MAKE INDUSTRIAL WASTE FIGHT BACK
Our approach is based on a key concept: using natural resources to give new life to depleted materials. The idea is almost embarrassingly simple: agricultural by-products and organic acids can do everything industrial acid does — dissolve metals, recover them, do it clean — and do it better. We use orange peels, apple peels, artichoke leaves, grape pomace, sea algae, and other agricultural waste to pull lithium, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths out of spent batteries and industrial scrap, without the chemistry the rest of the industry can't escape. What that actually changes:
WE DIDN'T START IN A LAB. WE STARTED IN FOGGIA.
Foggia isn't known for deep tech. It's known for its farmland — orange groves for miles, artichoke fields nobody had a second use for beyond the harvest. What Foggia has never lacked is agricultural waste. What it lacked, at least on paper, was any reason to expect a battery-recycling company to start there instead of Munich, Boston, or Beijing.
So it started small and specific: an idea in the head of a master's student, worked out in his own room before it ever got near a lab bench — local citrus waste, borrowed glassware, and more ambition than budget. That idea earned its way into the STAR Facility Centre at the University of Foggia, under Professor Matteo Francavilla, one of the world's leading voices on biomass valorization. That's where it stopped being one student's hunch and became hundreds of validated experiments; then two patents, then a company other people were willing to bet on.
We're building the same kind of partnership now with global industry: Proof of Concept Agreements, Joint Development Agreements, and Joint Ventures with manufacturers who have the scrap, the scale, and the need for a technology like ours to do something about it.
This is how we envision humanity farming, over time, the materials it once extracted from the ground. And we are already doing it, from Italy, from America, from Japan, and, gradually, from everywhere else, against all odds, starting right now.
PROPRIETARY REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGIES
AraBat's patented AraMet process recovers critical raw materials from lithium-ion batteries, capacitors, and other electronic waste streams, replacing the mineral acids and industrial oxidants conventional recycling depends on with organic acids and agricultural by-products. AraMet's patent family claims more than twenty plant by-products and twenty-five distinct organic acids and their mixtures for their use in electronic recycling — the widest documented reagent library of any critical-materials recovery process disclosed to date. That breadth is the point: instead of one fixed chemistry, AraMet is selected and tuned to the feedstock in front of it, whether that's battery black mass, capacitor scrap, or electronic powder. Two patent families protect the platform, built on hundreds of validated experimental campaigns.
Innovative pre-treatment or leaching assistance (ultrasound or microwave) is applied selectively, only on the feedstocks that actually benefit from it, rather than as a fixed step run on every batch regardless of need. It's one more way the process is tuned to what it's actually processing, instead of forcing every input through the same recipe.
ARAMET: ONE PATENTED PLATFORM, ANY SCRAP
AraBat has developed AraMet, a patented and proprietary bio-based hydrometallurgical process, designed for the efficient and sustainable recovery of critical materials from end-of-life lithium batteries and electronic waste. It is structured into three key phases:
Mechanical Pretreatment
Spent batteries and electronic by-products are discharged and mechanically shredded to recover the first materials, like copper or aluminum, and produce black mass, the active material containing critical metals, or black powder.
Bio-based Leaching
Black mass (or black powder) undergoes a bio-based leaching process, using water, weak organic acids (<1.5 M citric acid, or other organic acids), and plant-based biomass from agricultural by-products (e.g., orange peels, apple peels, artichoke leaves). This step can be enhanced with ultrasound or microwave technology to accelerate metal recovery.
Selective Precipitations
The process uses a pH adjustment mechanism to selectively recover critical metals as oxides, hydroxides and/or carbonates through three advanced precipitation techniques, including CO₂ bubbling.
ABOUT US
Our co-founders all come from the beautiful Puglia (Italy) and bring a unique blend of expertise, education, curiosity, ambition, and boldness in challenging established power structures. This diverse and resilient foundation equips our team with the essential qualities needed to disrupt and transform the status quo. Each member of our management team embodies the determination and innovative spirit crucial to driving our company toward success.
Raffaele Nacchiero
CEO
Expertise in Business Administration and Supply Chain Management. PhD in Engineering
Giovanni Miccolis
COO
Expertise in Logistics and Operations. MSc in Engineering
Leonardo Renna
CFO
Expertise in Green Finance and Compliance. MSc in Economics
Leonardo Binetti
CTO
Expertise in Metallurgy and Industrial Plant. PhD in Engineering
Vincenzo Scarano
CMO
Expertise in Marketing and Corporate Communications. MSc in Business Management
GLOBALLY RECOGNIZED, NOT JUST BY US
More than 25 awards and grants, in Italy and abroad, back the technology on this page, among them the Premio Nazionale per l’Innovazione 2022 (Cleantech & Energy), the ENI Joule for Entrepreneurship 2022, awarded in person by the President of the Italian Republic, Sergio Mattarella, and the MOST Mobility Competition 2024. AraBat has also been named to TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield 200 (2025) and Hello Tomorrow’s Top 100 Deep Tech Startups to Watch (2026, selected from 4,800 applications across 108 countries).
Interested in learning more?
FAQ
AraBat is a deep-tech company that recovers critical raw materials, including lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper, and rare earths, from spent batteries, capacitors, and other electronic waste, using a patented biomass-driven process instead of the industrial acids conventional recycling depends on. Engineered in Italy since 2022, AraBat Corporation was incorporated in the United States in 2026 to scale the technology globally.
We think a world this advanced shouldn't depend on a handful of countries to refine the materials it runs on. AraMet makes critical-materials recovery possible with agricultural waste instead of industrial acid — which means it can be built anywhere something grows, not only where a mine or a refinery already exists.
Our Made-in-Italy technologies—such as the green hydrometallurgical process AraMet—stand out for their bio-based, sustainable approach, which drastically reduces CO₂ emissions and eliminates NOx and SOx emissions entirely. What truly sets them apart are our proprietary technological enhancements, ranging from advanced leaching assistance systems to "secret" mechanisms and ingredients for selective precipitation.
Lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, copper, aluminum, graphite, and rare earth elements, recovered from lithium-ion batteries, ceramic capacitors, and other electronic and industrial waste streams.
Agricultural by-products already produced near where the waste itself is processed — orange peels, apple peels, artichoke leaves, grape pomace, and many other regional agricultural residues. Because AraMet isn't tied to a single reagent, the biomass source can be adapted to whatever a given region already produces.
Our first pilot recycling facility has been developed in Italy. The technology is currently validated at pilot scale, with hundreds of experimental campaigns behind it on certified public laboratories, and our roadmap moves from pilot to a demo plant and, from there, to full industrial scale.
Three ways: proof of concept agreements with manufacturers or recyclers who want to test AraMet on their own waste streams; licensing agreements for partners who want to run the technology in-house; and research partnerships with public or private universities and research centers.
Yes. AraBat is currently raising its seed round, and we're actively looking for industrial partners across battery, electronics, and critical-materials supply chains.
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Contact us
We’re currently raising our new investment round and actively building partnerships across battery, electronics, and critical-materials supply chains. Whether you’re evaluating an investment, exploring a proof of concept for your own waste streams, or interested in research collaboration, we’d like to hear from you.
AraBat promotes the recycling of lithium batteries and electronics through the use of agri-food waste, contributing to a greener and more circular future.
- 251 Little Falls Drive, Wilmington, 19808 Delaware, U.S.
- Via Goffredo Mameli 34, 71121 Foggia (FG), Italy
- +39 329 6630617
- +44 788 9710861
- info@arabat.it