Led by experts in the international automotive industry, Raleigh-based ScoutIt is a two-sided marketplace platform designed to help end-of-life electric vehicle (EV) batteries be resold. The startup’s mission is to enable a true circular battery economy through a B2B marketplace, not only helping each party to the transactions but also making EVs more sustainable overall.
While working at automotive companies in Italy such as Lamborghini and Yamaha Motors, Co-Founder and CEO Davide Giacobbe realized that a big issue in the industry is managing EV batteries once they’ve reached the end of their usage cycle. As the demand for EV vehicles accelerates, Giacobbe and his other Co-Founder and CTO Niccolò Ferrari wanted to create a solution that easily and quickly connects potential battery sellers to reuse specialists, energy storage manufacturers and repurposing companies.
“The value proposition for [battery buyers] is that they can find more affordable battery supply,” Giacobbe said. “They can also reduce carbon footprint compared to solutions based on new batteries, since there is no new manufacturing involved.”
Giacobbe was one of 20 founders to whom CED awarded scholarships to cover the cost of their attendance at this year’s Business of Software (BoS) conference, which was held in Raleigh for the first time on Oct. 2-4.
According to a research report published by Spherical Insights & Consulting, the global EV battery recycling market is projected to reach $38B by 2032. Currently, the majority (about 70%) of the recycling market comes from what’s known as “production scrap”—batteries that flunk a step during the production process and can’t be sold commercially— as opposed to end-of-life batteries that have already been used in EVs. But that ratio is expected to flip as more and more EVs are sold and driven in the coming years.
Giacobbe and Ferrari founded the startup in late 2022 after seeing the potential that recycled batteries can contribute to a more sustainable and economical market. With ScoutIt, its services expand to not only battery sellers and re-users, but also to stationary energy storage systems, which can store energy and release it in the form of electricity when needed.
While developing their first MVP, Giacobbe found that a common issue for EV manufacturers was the struggle to find sustainable disposal solutions for their batteries. There is direct recycling, where these manufacturers can pay to have their batteries picked up and disposed of according to proper recycling standards. But this option can be expensive for the manufacturers.
ScoutIt aggregates all the different parties that wan those batteries and provides options for these sellers to connect to that will not only save them money, but also help other companies get batteries without the need to manufacture new ones.
According to Giacobbe, when batteries start to reach their end of life, they still hold up to 80% of their original value because of (among other factors) the scarcity of the metals used to make the battery. Instead of these battery sellers having to pay for recycling or getting rid of useful battery packs, they can instead sell them on ScoutIt to generate revenue, while also reducing the carbon footprint to manufacture new batteries.
Giacobbe said that with his and Ferrari’s background coming from Europe, they possess the opportunity to expand ScoutIt’s network of clients to an international scale. His hope and target is to create facilitation for the EV recycling market through considering, for the future, to expand ScoutIt’s operations on not only software solutions, but also hardware solutions, where they can help to provide a direct impact for the circular battery economy.
“I believe that EVs can completely eliminate carbon footprint if we have the right solution, both on the renewable power generation and on recycling and repurposing technologies,” Giacobbe said. “This second-life battery market needs to be pushed, and we are creating a solution to facilitate this market and to enable electric vehicle batteries’ circular economy.”
