DEScycle has secured more than €10m in confirmed non-dilutive funding over the past 10 months, as the UK metals recovery company moves towards industrial validation of its critical and precious metals processing platform.
The grant funding, secured through competitive UK and European innovation programmes, brings the company’s total capital secured to approximately £30m across equity, grants, and partner funding.
The latest support includes €5m from EU Horizon, €1.5m from Germany’s SPRIND, €2.5m from the EIC Accelerator, £0.9m through Innovate UK Investor Partnerships, and £0.5m through a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
DEScycle said the funding will support workstreams linked to industrial validation, including longer operation of its demonstration plant, additional data generation for design decisions, expanded customer trial capability, and integration of complementary technologies into its wider platform.
It will also support the development of digital product passports, which are intended to provide traceability for recovered metals and give customers clearer information on supply chain provenance.
Construction of DEScycle’s demo plant is underway in Teesside, with launch targeted for the second half of 2026. The company is working towards repeatable commercial deployment after demo-plant validation and key techno-economic milestones.
DEScycle is developing a distributed, modular metals processing platform to recover critical and precious metals closer to where materials are generated. Its initial focus is electronic waste, which the business sees as an above-ground source of metals that could be recovered into domestic supply chains.
Fred White, co-founder and chief commercial officer at DEScycle, said: “Critical raw materials are becoming a strategic priority for both the UK and Europe, and that is creating growing demand for new metals processing infrastructure. Securing more than €10m in confirmed non-dilutive funding across competitive European and UK programmes is a strong signal of the importance of domestic metals recovery.
“For DEScycle, this funding helps de-risk deployment by allowing us to run our demo plant for longer, generate more data and make better design decisions before commercial scale-up. It also enables us to trial and integrate complementary technologies into our platform, helping us bring a stronger product to market.”
Critical raw materials policy is increasingly tied to industrial resilience, with advanced manufacturing, electrification, AI infrastructure, and digital systems all dependent on secure metals supply. Much of the existing processing infrastructure remains centralised, capital-intensive, and slow to scale, leaving governments and industrial customers exposed to long and geographically concentrated supply chains.
Distributed recovery systems are emerging as one response to that pressure, particularly where industrial customers want traceable inputs and shorter supply routes. By starting with electronic waste, DEScycle is targeting material streams that already exist within domestic markets rather than relying solely on primary extraction.
The company has secured strategic and commercial validation from partners including Mitsubishi, GAP Group, and Cisco. GAP Group and Cisco are confirmed for customer trials in 2026, giving DEScycle a route to test its platform with industrial customers as it moves towards wider commercial engagement.
Moving from technology development into repeatable industrial deployment remains one of the most difficult stages for UK deep tech companies. DEScycle’s next phase will depend on proving that its Teesside plant can generate reliable operational data, support customer trials, and provide the basis for commercial roll-out.
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