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In this episode, we talk to Sarah Fleischer, 3x founder and Co-founder & CEO of tozero, a Munich-based startup that recovers lithium and graphite directly from battery waste. Sarah is a mechanical engineer and CDTM alum who has raised over $20 million and recently launched tozero's industrial demo plant in Germany.
We get into her path to tozero, which includes two earlier ventures that did not survive. At 22 she dropped out of CDTM to sell German baby milk formula to Chinese mothers, a bootstrapped e-commerce business that worked commercially but fell apart over a founder split. Her second company helped Chinese tourists purchase luxury goods across Europe and ultimately had to close. She talks about the three months it took to climb out of that hole, and the realization that both ventures had been driven by money rather than mission, which she now sees as the reason many founders fail.
She also opens up about growing up as a third culture kid, half German and half Chinese, moving between Canada, Hong Kong and Shanghai as her father took computer science professorships around the world. She reflects on watching Shanghai transform in just a few years, what it means to never quite fit into a single culture, and how that shaped her resilience as a founder.
We get into how the technology actually works. Her co-founder Xenia developed a method to extract over 97% of the lithium from spent batteries using organic additives instead of harsh chemicals, functioning somewhat like a coffee filter for critical raw materials. Sarah breaks down why lithium and graphite have remained the unsolved challenge in battery recycling, why almost 99% of refined lithium currently comes from a single country, and what the looming supply deficit from 2030 onwards means for European industry.
On the business side she is refreshingly grounded. She makes the case for why owning and operating your own plants beats licensing, and explains how tozero built an industrial demo plant with just 17 million in total funding. She also talks about why Honda, Intel and Japan's JGC ended up on the cap table, and what strategic investors unlock that pure financial VCs cannot.
We wrap up with a rapid fire round covering everything from deep sea versus deep space to leather jackets and late nights.
