Northvolt Brand Guidelines: The Swedish Gigafactory Start-Up That Went Bankrupt in 2025

A Swedish gigafactory on paper.

Northvolt began in 2015 as SGF Energy, the letters standing for Swedish Gigafactory, Swedish Wikipedia says. English Wikipedia names its founders as Peter Carlsson and Paolo Cerruti, who had both worked in supply chain and operations at Tesla; Swedish Wikipedia adds that the start-up was financed at first by Harald Mix’s investment company Vargas and was presented publicly in 2016, with Carlsson as chief executive. Its aim was to make lithium-ion batteries in Europe, chiefly for the car industry, and to control the chain from raw material to finished cell.

The company took the name Northvolt in 2017. That year it received a loan from the European Investment Bank for a demonstration plant in Västerås, and on 19 October 2017, Swedish Wikipedia says, it announced its choice of sites: a full-scale factory at Bergsbyn in Skellefteå, in the far north of Sweden, and development work and a test plant in Västerås. Ground was broken for Northvolt Labs in Västerås on 27 April 2018. A smaller factory in Gdańsk, Poland, to make battery modules, was announced in October 2018.

The head office stayed in Stockholm. Money followed the plans. English Wikipedia records a further European Investment Bank loan in 2019 and investment that year from companies including the BMW Group, the Volkswagen Group and Goldman Sachs; Swedish Wikipedia says that in May 2024 Volkswagen was the largest shareholder, followed by Goldman Sachs.

Ett, Labs, Dwa and Drei.

Northvolt named its plants with numbers in different languages. Northvolt Ett — Swedish for “one” — was the gigafactory in Skellefteå, which English Wikipedia says draws renewable power from Skellefteå Kraft’s nearby hydropower plant. Swedish Wikipedia says the first battery there was built on 28 December 2021, and English Wikipedia says the first customer cells were delivered in 2022. The factory made prismatic cells, and was planned to grow in phases to far greater output, with thousands of staff at full production.

Northvolt Labs in Västerås was the research and development centre. Northvolt Dwa, Polish for “two,” was the factory in Gdańsk for battery energy storage systems, which English Wikipedia says opened in 2023. Northvolt Drei, German for “three,” was a planned cell factory near Heide in Schleswig-Holstein, on which construction began in March 2024. Other plans included a joint venture with Volvo Cars called Novo Energy, a factory planned at a former paper mill in Borlänge, and a plant near Montreal in Canada. In 2021 the company bought Cuberg, a California battery start-up spun out of Stanford, and ran it as Northvolt Cuberg.

The plans outran the factories. In 2024 English Wikipedia records that BMW cancelled a supply contract in June because of delivery delays. On 23 September 2024 Northvolt announced about 1,600 job cuts across Skellefteå, Västerås and Stockholm and halted the expansion of Northvolt Ett; the subsidiary set up for that expansion, Northvolt Ett Expansion AB, was declared bankrupt in early October 2024, Swedish Wikipedia says. Volvo Cars said in October 2024 that it would take over Northvolt’s shares in Novo Energy.

On 21 November 2024 Northvolt filed for Chapter 11 protection in the United States, and Carlsson stepped down as chief executive. In the following weeks it said it would sell its industrial battery division, and in January 2025 it sold its remaining stake in Hydrovolt, its battery-recycling joint venture, to Norsk Hydro.

Design and documentation.

Industrial batteries are rarely seen by the people who depend on them. They sit under the seat of a forklift truck, in a locked room behind a telephone exchange or in the cabinets that keep a data centre running when the mains fail, so the makers in this guide have to show their products in places most readers will never visit.

Their pictures tend to come from a small set of scenes. There are rows of cells on a factory floor, forklift batteries packed into steel trays, standby racks lined up in data centres and telecom rooms, and cutaway diagrams that open a cell to show its plates, separators and chemistry. Newer lithium makers add architects’ renderings of large cell factories, and the oldest firms reach back to photographs of early lead and nickel works and to the railway, telephone and submarine customers they first supplied.

The trade is also a story of ownership. Many of these names have passed through electrical groups, private equity funds, stock markets and energy companies, and several survive mainly as brands inside larger groups. Regulators have looked at the trade too: in 2017 Germany’s competition authority fined two makers of industrial batteries over a shared lead surcharge, and a French heritage inventory has recorded one maker’s Bordeaux factory buildings as industrial architecture.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its batteries are made and which product names it uses — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

Bankruptcy, and what became of the plants.

The restructuring did not save the company. On 12 March 2025 the board of Northvolt AB filed for bankruptcy in Sweden, the company announced from Stockholm, citing rising capital costs, geopolitical instability, supply-chain disruption, shifts in demand and difficulties in ramping up production. Semafor reported the same day that a court-appointed trustee would oversee the sale of its assets. Northvolt AB, Northvolt Ett, Northvolt Labs, Northvolt Revolt and Northvolt Systems were the entities that filed; the German and North American subsidiaries did not file in their own countries at that time, the company said.

The buyer for most of what remained was Lyten, a lithium-sulfur battery company from San Jose, California. Swedish Wikipedia says Lyten announced a binding agreement in August 2025 to acquire Northvolt’s remaining assets in Sweden and Germany. In a release dated 27 February 2026, Lyten said it had completed its purchase of Northvolt Ett and the Ett expansion site in Skellefteå and Northvolt Labs in Västerås, that it planned to restart both, and that it had already closed its purchase of the Gdańsk storage factory in October 2025. It said it would form an industrial hub at the Skellefteå site that would also host data centres.

The German site took longer. On 1 July 2026, the trade site Battery-Tech Network reported, Lyten signed an exclusive memorandum of understanding with KfW, the German state development bank, with Northvolt Drei Project GmbH and with its shareholder LG Batterie GmbH over the unfinished factory near Heide, aiming to sign a definitive sale agreement in the third quarter of 2026. That target passed without a signing: on 1 October 2026 the Swedish paper Norran reported that Lyten called the talks far advanced but that legal and commercial details were still open, and no new date had been announced by early November 2026. The Northvolt name lives on mainly in the names of those sites, and the company’s website still carries its bankruptcy announcement.

For a design guide, Northvolt shows how a battery start-up named its company and its plants as one system: Ett, Labs, Dwa and Drei. Compare Tesla, where its founders had worked, and Saft, the French maker of industrial and specialty batteries. For this guide we use a dark spruce, frost white and a lichen green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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