In a fourth-floor office on Breitenfelder Gasse in Vienna's eighth district, a small team is trying to do something that the global mining industry has spent a century doing with sulfuric acid, kerosene, and very large tanks: pull a single metal cleanly out of a messy soup of other metals. The twist is that Magmatic Bio wants to do it with proteins, custom-designed ones, built to grab a lithium or nickel ion and let almost everything else wash past [Magmatic.bio].
The company, founded in 2022 by Oliver Siegel and Jorg Herwanger, calls itself a synthetic biology play on the critical metals shortage [Magmatic.bio]. What it means in practice, according to the company's own product description, is engineering synthetic proteins that bind target metals in complex mixtures "with atomic precision" and then releasing them on command, so the output is a refined intermediate rather than a slurry that needs three more processing steps [Magmatic.bio]. The first two applications Magmatic has named publicly are upgrading crude lithium intermediates into battery-grade lithium carbonate, and producing battery-grade nickel sulphate without the cobalt solvent extraction step that dominates current refining [Dealroom.co, 2026].
The bet
Metal separation is one of those problems that sounds boring until you look at the cost stack of an EV battery. Solvent extraction, the incumbent technology, works, but it is capital-heavy, chemically aggressive, and geographically concentrated. Roughly speaking, the world refines most of its battery-grade nickel and a large share of its lithium in a handful of facilities, most of them in China, using flowsheets developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Magmatic's wager is that a protein engineered to bind only Li+ or only Ni2+ can collapse several of those unit operations into one, with less reagent consumption and a smaller physical footprint [CB Insights, 2026].
The customer is not the EV maker. It is the miner or recycler sitting on a low-grade stream that is currently uneconomic to refine: spodumene leachates, mixed hydroxide precipitates from laterite ores, black mass from end-of-life batteries. If Magmatic can sell a drop-in module that takes those streams and outputs a battery-grade salt, the value proposition is straightforward arithmetic on the customer's gross margin per tonne.
Why it could be big
The tailwinds are unusually aligned. The EU's Critical Raw Materials Act sets explicit 2030 targets for domestic refining and recycling of lithium, nickel, and cobalt, and European refiners are actively shopping for technologies that do not require shipping intermediates to Asia. Nucleus Capital, the Berlin-based climate fund that backed Magmatic's pre-seed round in March 2024, has built a thesis around exactly this kind of biological substitute for industrial chemistry [Crunchbase, 2026].
A back of envelope calculation, then. Battery-grade lithium carbonate has traded in a wide range over the last two years, but call it roughly 15,000 USD per tonne at recent levels. A single mid-sized lithium refinery processes on the order of 20,000 tonnes per year of LCE. If a protein-based polishing step lifts recovery by even three percentage points and shaves 500 USD per tonne off operating cost, that is around 13 million USD per year of margin per facility. Multiply by the dozen or so European and North American refineries that have been announced or financed since 2022, and the addressable annual contract value sits in the low hundreds of millions before you touch nickel or recycling. None of that materializes without a working pilot, but the unit economics are not the bottleneck. The biology is.
The team and traction
Siegel, the managing director listed on the company's Vienna registration, came to Magmatic from a long run in European biotech. He was previously CEO of AFFiRiS AG, the Vienna-based vaccine developer, and before that ran pharmaceuticals at NM Rothschild & Sons in London [OMICS International, 2026]. Earlier still, he worked at AMSilk GmbH, the spider-silk protein company, which is a relevant credential for anyone trying to commercialize designed proteins at industrial scale [RocketReach]. Co-founder Jorg Herwanger's background runs through the other side of the problem: a PhD in geology from Imperial College London and senior roles at Sharp Reflections and Heriot-Watt University, which is to say he understands what comes out of the ground before the chemists get to it [RocketReach, 2026]. The growing team includes Klemens Slunitschek as principal chemical engineer and Azul María Giménez Moreno as project developer for critical minerals [RocketReach, 2026].
The honest counterfactual
The nearest competitors are instructive. Endolith, based in Colorado, uses engineered microbes to improve copper bioleaching at the mine face. Allonnia, the Ginkgo Bioworks spinout, has a broader biological remediation portfolio that touches metal recovery [CB Insights, 2026]. What bears will say is that protein-based separations have been demonstrated at bench scale for decades and have rarely survived the jump to continuous industrial flow, where fouling, denaturation, and the cost of producing the protein itself tend to eat the margin advantage. What bulls answer, and what Magmatic's pitch implicitly rests on, is that protein design has changed in the last five years: AlphaFold-era tooling makes it plausible to iterate on binding affinity and stability fast enough to actually engineer for an industrial environment rather than discover a candidate and hope. Whether that is true for lithium and nickel specifically is the experiment the company is running.
What to watch
The next twelve months should produce two visible signals. The first is a named pilot partner, almost certainly a European lithium converter or a black-mass recycler, since that is where the regulatory pull is strongest and the supply chains are short enough for a Vienna-based startup to service. The second is a seed extension or proper Series A, which a pre-seed company with this kind of capex-light wedge would typically raise twelve to eighteen months after the initial Nucleus check. If both arrive, Magmatic graduates from interesting biology to a real refining technology company. If only the funding arrives, it stays a science project for another cycle.
The incumbent Magmatic has to beat is not a startup. It is solvent extraction itself, and specifically the integrated flowsheets operated by China's GEM Co. and Huayou Cobalt, which set the cost floor for battery-grade nickel sulphate today. Out-engineering a sixty-year-old process at industrial scale is a tall order. Doing it with proteins designed in Vienna would be one of the more interesting things to happen to refining in a long time.