Australian battery materials recycler Neometals has launched a new placement and entitlement offer to raise a total of A$20m ($13m) to support lithium research and vanadium and titanium business units.

The placement, said to be the first equity raise in 11 years, will include share issuance to sophisticated, professional and institutional investors to garner A$7m.

As part of this placement, it will issue 36.8 million new shares, at A$0.19 apiece.

The offer marks a 24% discount to Neometals’s last stock close of A$0.250 on 20 November 2023, and a 26.1% discount to the five-day volume weighted average price of A$0.257.

The remaining A$13m will be raised through an entitlement offer to the company’s eligible shareholders in Australia and New Zealand. This offer will be non-underwritten and non-renounceable.

Neometals managing director Chris Reed said: “We have not raised equity capital for 11 years and welcome new investors to join the register as well as those existing shareholders topping up their holdings.

“Not only will the placement and entitlement offer allow us to bridge finance ahead of more material revenues to the Primobius JV [joint venture], it also allows us to bolster what has historically been a retail-dominated register.”

The company will utilise the proceeds from the placement and entitlement offer, along with its cash on hand, to fund its activities in the development of Primobius LiB recycling.

It will also channel the proceeds to lithium chemical research and development activities, vanadium and titanium business units, as well as working capital, corporate and other requirements.

In July 2023, the company entered an offtake agreement with Glencore to supply all the vanadium products developed at its Vanadium Recovery Project in Finland.

Neometals subsidiary Novana will sell all of the saleable recovered vanadium-bearing products from the project for an initial period of five years.