The Wallenberg family doesn't place many bets on early-stage startups. When it does, people notice.
So when FAM—the investment vehicle managing one of Europe's most storied industrial fortunes—wrote a check for 41 million Swedish kronor last October, it signaled something shifting in the calculus around clean energy manufacturing. The recipient: Holyvolt, a barely two-year-old Stockholm venture developing nanoparticle coatings that could, if the technology delivers, change how solar cells and batteries get made.
The 100 million SEK seed round, roughly $10.8 million, also drew Volvo Business Services International and a reunion of iZettle's founding duo. Jacob de Geer and Magnus Nilsson, who sold their payments company to PayPal for $2.2 billion in 2018, jointly poured in 14.6 million SEK. Together they now own just over 15% of Holyvolt—not exactly side-bet territory for founders with that kind of exit under their belts.
Screen Printing's Unlikely Moment
What Holyvolt is building sounds almost deceptively simple: screen-printed solar cells and batteries. The same basic technique used for decades to slap logos on t-shirts, now retooled with nanomaterials to manufacture thin-film energy components.
The company, founded in 2022, calls its approach "Nanopaste Printing." It uses technical screen printing to create thin-film solar panels, printed batteries, and heating films—all from what Holyvolt describes as abundant, non-toxic materials sourced within Europe. That last detail isn't incidental. It's practically the whole pitch in Brussels right now.
Screen printing already dominates conventional solar manufacturing for good reason: it's cheap, it scales, and it works. What's newer is its migration into battery production and next-generation photovoltaics. Holyvolt claims its thin-film technology performs "as effective as silicon," though the company has yet to publish specific efficiency metrics that would let skeptics judge that claim properly.
The startup operates out of Stockholm and Munich, where it opened what it calls a Product Innovation Lab earlier this year. Team size sits somewhere between 11 and 50 employees—a range that speaks to either rapid hiring or the vagueness startups sometimes prefer at this stage.
The Industrial Money
Shareholder filings reported by Impact Loop reveal how the round broke down. FAM took a 4.9% post-dilution stake with its 41 million SEK. Volvo Business Services International, the corporate investor arm, put in 25 million SEK for 2.94%. That suggests a post-money valuation hovering around 850 million SEK, or just under $80 million—ambitious for a company barely past its second birthday, but not outlandish given the pedigree of the backers.
Course Corrected, an early believer that led Holyvolt's 13.6 million SEK pre-seed in December 2022, doubled down and now holds approximately 6.95%.
Volvo's participation hints at potential automotive applications—perhaps battery components for electric vehicles, or integration into industrial heating systems. The company hasn't spelled out those use cases publicly, but corporate investors don't typically write seven-figure checks for technologies with zero relevance to their core business.
In November 2023, Holyvolt brought on Eva Kaijser as CFO. A year later, it landed Magnus Tyreman, former head of McKinsey Europe, as board chairman. Tyreman's appointment suggests the kind of governance maturity that institutional investors like FAM expect before opening their wallets.
Europe's Solar Reckoning
The timing of Holyvolt's fundraise maps neatly onto a broader European anxiety about clean energy dependency.
The EU installed approximately 66 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2024—a record, and a testament to how aggressively the continent is pivoting toward renewables. But nearly all of those panels came from Asia, predominantly China. European manufacturers, once leaders in photovoltaics, have been priced out or shuttered over the past decade.
That's started to feel less like an economic inconvenience and more like a strategic vulnerability. In April 2024, the European Commission launched the European Solar Charter, a framework meant to revive domestic production through procurement incentives and policy support. The idea: create demand for European-made components, even if they cost slightly more, to rebuild manufacturing know-how and reduce reliance on supply chains that could be disrupted by geopolitics or tariffs.
Holyvolt positions itself squarely within that policy moment. Its emphasis on locally sourced, non-toxic materials checks every box the EU Solar Charter could want. Whether that translates into actual contracts and revenue remains the open question.
The challenge, as anyone in the solar industry will tell you, is cost. Chinese manufacturers benefit from economies of scale, government subsidies, and integrated supply chains that European startups simply can't match yet. Holyvolt will need to prove its screen-printing approach offers either a meaningful performance advantage or a manufacturing cost structure competitive enough to matter.
What Success Looks Like
The company plans to use the seed capital to scale production and expand the team—standard startup goals, but particularly crucial in hardware-intensive sectors where prototypes only get you so far.
What remains unclear is Holyvolt's path to market. Will it license its nanopaste technology to established manufacturers? Build its own production lines? Partner with industrial players like Volvo on specific applications? The company hasn't publicly articulated a go-to-market strategy, which is either prudent stealth or a sign that those decisions are still being worked out.
For now, Holyvolt has something perhaps more valuable than a detailed roadmap: credible backers with deep pockets and strategic patience. FAM doesn't invest for quick flips. The Wallenberg empire was built over generations, and its investment vehicles tend to think in decades, not quarters.
That kind of backing buys time—time to refine the technology, time to navigate the messy realities of scaling hardware, time to wait for policy winds to shift further in Europe's favor.
Whether that's enough time to turn screen-printed nanopaste into a viable alternative to Asia's solar dominance is the bet FAM, Volvo, and two iZettle billionaires just made. The answer, as with most seed-stage deep tech, won't arrive quickly.
