The electric vehicle recycling chain faces a problem that rarely makes headlines: safely breaking a complex, high-voltage electric drivetrain apart before any actual recycling can begin. Luxembourg-based start-up R3 Robotics, formerly known as Circu Li-ion, has just made that problem its entire identity.
The company announced a formal rebranding alongside a €20 million fundraising. But the name change signals more than a marketing refresh.
Where Circu Li-ion focused solely on battery packs, R3 Robotics is now pursuing the full electric vehicle system at an industrial scale: battery packs, e-motors, power electronics, and other high-value electrified components.
The real bottleneck
Debates around EV recycling typically center on chemistry: how to extract lithium, cobalt, or manganese from spent cells. But Antoine Welter, CEO and co-founder of R3 Robotics, argues the industry is focused on the wrong problem.
“The bottleneck isn’t recycling technology,” he said to news outlet Tech.eu. “It’s clean feedstock: getting complex electrified systems safely and cost-effectively dismantled at an industrial scale.”
Manual disassembly of EV systems is slow, hazardous due to high-voltage components, and extremely hard to standardise across the wide variety of architectures used by different vehicle manufacturers. That’s exactly the gap R3 Robotics’ automated platform is designed to fill.
Robots that read the object
The system pairs computer vision and AI with purpose-built robotic tooling to disassemble battery packs, motors, and electronics in a repeatable, high-throughput process.
Around 85% of the hardware is standard industrial equipment; their robotic equivalent of hands is engineered in-house. Welter describes the logic in unusually accessible terms: “It’s a bit like prompting ChatGPT to dismantle an object in different steps. The system does what a human would do.”
According to the company, the platform delivers up to 32% lower processing costs compared to manual disassembly, up to 75% higher throughput, and over 98% process repeatability.
Its industrial reference facility in Karlsruhe, Germany, currently runs at a capacity of 1,500 tons of battery material per year. An R&D and pilot site is located in Luxembourg.
Two ways to work with it
The company offers two service models. Under Disassembly-as-a-Service, clients send end-of-life systems to R3’s certified facilities, where the company handles the entire process from discharge and diagnostics through to disassembly and sorting.
Under a Robotics-as-a-Service model, R3 deploys automated lines at the customer’s facility, with the client retaining ownership of the recovered materials. The latter model is being scaled up through 2026.
“The unit economics work best when you minimise logistics,” Welter noted. “You need to treat the product as close as possible to where it’s sourced.” Europe’s legislative direction is firmly behind this kind of infrastructure. The EU Battery Regulation sets a 70% recycling efficiency target for lithium-based batteries by 2030.
