Kamran Mahdavi
Kamran Mahdavi is an Iranian-British entrepreneur and commodities specialist whose more than 20 years of experience in global commodity trade provided an unusual but highly relevant foundation for co-founding one of the UK's most significant clean technology companies. Over the course of his career, Mahdavi built and managed a successful global commodity trade house, led large-scale exploration projects across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe, and oversaw the acquisition of various commodity assets. This deep experience in the physical movement, pricing, and geopolitics of raw materials — including critical minerals — gave him both the commercial instincts and the industry relationships to pursue a vision of domestic battery material circularity in the UK.
In 2020, Mahdavi co-founded Altilium alongside Dr Christian Marston, a materials scientist with 13 years of experience at Sumitomo Corporation. The two founded the company around a clear thesis: that the UK's transition to electric vehicles was going to create a rapidly growing wave of end-of-life battery materials, and that the country lacked the recycling infrastructure to capture the economic and environmental value embedded in those materials. Without domestic recycling capacity, the UK would remain dependent on imported virgin critical minerals — lithium, nickel, cobalt, graphite — from geopolitically sensitive sources, while waste batteries accumulated as both a liability and a missed opportunity.
As CEO, Mahdavi has led Altilium from founding to becoming the UK's only operating EV battery recycling facility at pilot scale. Under his leadership, the company has developed and validated its proprietary EcoCathode hydrometallurgical process, which recovers over 95% of key battery metals from end-of-life cells with 74% lower CO₂ emissions compared to conventional mining — as independently verified by Imperial College London and the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. He has built an institutional investor base that includes SQM Lithium Ventures, Marubeni Corporation, and Mizuho Bank, raising total funding of over $43 million.
Mahdavi has represented Altilium on a UK government trade mission to India to chair a high-level roundtable on UK-India critical minerals collaboration, and has participated in delegations to Japan alongside UK ministers to advance strategic partnerships with Japanese institutional investors. He has been widely recognised as a central figure in building the UK's domestic battery recycling industry, and his leadership has positioned Altilium as a leading candidate to deliver the country's critical minerals security for the EV transition.
