CarbonX's EIC Accelerator Attacks China's Grip on Graphite

The anode of almost every lithium-ion battery is made of graphite, and Europe imports nearly all of it, mostly from China. CarbonX, founded in 2014 as a spin-off of TU Delft from work that began there in 2007, makes a different material: a patented 3D carbon network it says conducts electrons and moves ions better than graphite anodes, produced by a low-temperature continuous process in existing carbon black plants rather than in new factories.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, ECo-AnodeX, at its October 2024 cut-off for blended finance under the renewable energy challenge, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,612.50 from June 2025 to May 2027. The project's numbers are ambitious: capacity of more than 20,000 tonnes a year already validated in existing facilities, a price of €5 to €6 per kilogram, €600 million of a battery carbon materials market it puts at €16.8 billion by 2030, and up to 10 gigatonnes of CO2 avoided by 2050.

A material that found batteries late

CarbonX did not start in batteries. Its own timeline records commercial production in Asia from 2018 and a first supply agreement in 2019 for automotive tyres, with the battery research facility in Delft opening only in 2021 and a single-layer pouch cell line commissioned in 2024. The material is the same; the application changed as graphite became a critical raw material question.

The money arrived with that shift. In December 2024 the company extended a €10 million growth round by about €4 million, co-led by the Energy Transition Fund Rotterdam managed by InnovationQuarter alongside existing shareholders Innovation Industries and Borski Fund, to increase testing capacity, secure contracts and prepare a feedstock mixing facility in the Port of Rotterdam ahead of first offtake agreements, as BeBeez reported. The company's own timeline puts the start of production at that Rotterdam mixing facility in 2026 and a first full production facility in 2028.

Qualification is the whole game

Battery materials are sold only after cell makers qualify them, which takes years. CarbonX says it is in late-stage qualification with several of the ten largest global cell manufacturers, and the one partner it names publicly is ElevenEs, the Serbian LFP maker, which began evaluating the material against conventional graphite anodes under a joint development agreement in February 2025. In May 2026 the two announced that the cooperation would continue into an advanced industrial-scale testing phase using full prismatic blade cells.

No offtake agreement has been announced, and no independent test data on the material's performance in cells has been published. The company's news in 2025 and 2026 is mostly institutional: joining the US Zero Emission Transportation Association, a trade mission to China, an advisory board appointment, its CTO made a fellow of the Netherlands Academy of Engineering, and a September 2026 post from the CEO on how hard it is to take Dutch innovation from proven technology to commercial scale.

1. Production in existing plantsDoneCommercial production in Asia since 2018, per the company.
2. Qualification by cell makersIn testingElevenEs industrial-scale phase from May 2026.
3. Offtake agreementsNot signedExpected from mid-2025 in earlier coverage; none announced.
4. Own production facilityPlannedRotterdam mixing facility in 2026, first full plant in 2028.

Twelve years, €17 million

€17 million over twelve years is modest for a materials company aiming at gigawatt-scale supply, and the EIC grant of €2.5 million is a seventh of that total. The award was blended finance, and no EIC Fund equity has been announced. The business model is to sell through partnerships with carbon black producers, cell manufacturers and carmakers in Europe, the US, China, India and South Korea, with the project promising more than 200 direct and 350 indirect jobs by 2030.

Graphite is a European policy problem

Graphite is on the EU's critical raw materials list, and its processing is concentrated in China, which is the political argument behind this grant and behind the Dutch and Rotterdam public money in the company's cap table. CarbonX's specific appeal is that it does not need new gigafactories: if the material really can be made in existing carbon black plants, European supply could be added without building the plants first. That claim, validated capacity of over 20,000 tonnes, is the one a buyer would test.