Behind the $500 million battery plant pitch: EnergyX is losing money fast and raising millions from small investors

A proposed lithium battery materials plant at TexAmericas Center could bring roughly $500 million in investment to Northeast Texas, but the company behind it is burning through cash, has never turned a profit and is funding much of its growth by selling stock to everyday investors at prices that have climbed sharply over the past year, federal filings show.

TexAmericas Center announced Tuesday that EnergyX has secured site control for about 330 acres near New Boston for a commercial-scale plant that would make lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, cathode material, a key component in electric vehicles, energy storage systems, drones and defense platforms. The project is a joint venture with San Diego-based Wildcat Discovery Technologies and would sit next to EnergyX’s Project Lonestar lithium operation and near the U.S. Army’s Red River Army Depot.

The proposed facility would produce about 15,000 metric tons of LFP cathode material a year in its first phase, with room to expand. EnergyX has invested about $20 million so far in its existing demonstration-scale work in the region, according to TexAmericas Center.

But the company stressed the plant is far from a sure thing. The project depends on EnergyX exercising its option to buy the site, “securing final approvals, obtaining financing and completing required development milestones before moving forward,” TexAmericas Center said.

“EnergyX’s site control at TexAmericas Center is not a final project approval,” said Eric Voyles, executive vice president and chief economic development officer of TexAmericas Center.

A review of EnergyX’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows why financing is the open question.

A company that doesn’t yet make money

EnergyX is the trade name for Energy Exploration Technologies Inc., a Puerto Rico corporation founded in 2018 and led by founder and CEO Teague Egan. It is a development-stage company that does not yet sell lithium commercially. In 2025, it reported about $1.3 million in revenue: roughly $244,000 from testing customer brine samples and $1.1 million from selling membrane equipment.

Against that, the company lost $20.9 million in 2025, about the same as the $20.8 million it lost in 2024. Since its founding, EnergyX has run up cumulative net losses of about $73.3 million, its accumulated deficit as of Dec. 31, 2025.

The company’s own auditors have flagged the strain. In their report for fiscal 2025, they included an explanatory paragraph noting “substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern,” accountants’ language for a company that may not have enough money to keep operating without raising more.

“Should financing efforts prove unsuccessful, we may be forced to discontinue operations, resulting in a total loss for our investors,” the company wrote in its April offering document.

Cash has been draining quickly. EnergyX reported $13.9 million on hand as of June 30, 2025, down from $36 million six months earlier, as it poured money into pilot and demonstration plants and equipment.

A marquee backer in General Motors

EnergyX is not relying on small investors alone. In April 2023, General Motors announced that its venture arm, GM Ventures, was leading a $50 million Series B financing round in the company and entering a strategic agreement to help develop EnergyX’s lithium extraction and refining technology.

The deal gave EnergyX a high-profile partner as it works to pull lithium from underground brine using a process it calls direct lithium extraction, which the companies say uses less energy, land and water than conventional evaporation ponds. For GM, the agreement was part of a broader push to lock up North American supplies of the materials needed for electric vehicle batteries.

The collaboration included a technology development program, an arrangement giving GM access to lithium produced with EnergyX’s technology for use in its EVs, and additional financing for lithium projects in North and South America, according to the companies.

“We’re energized by GM’s investment and will keep a ‘Day 1’ attitude as we pursue our goal of making EnergyX the biggest lithium company in the world,” Egan said at the time.

“EnergyX is developing a novel direct lithium extraction process that’s not only cost competitive but also will reduce energy, land and water usage as compared to the current extraction and processing process for brine-based lithium,” said Jeff Morrison, then GM’s vice president of global purchasing and supply chain.

The two companies remain linked. EnergyX still markets itself to investors as “backed by GM,” and as of mid-2025 the automaker held a right of first refusal to buy lithium from any EnergyX project, according to news reports. Neither company has announced an end to the partnership.

But the EV boom that the 2023 deal was built around has cooled sharply. GM said Jan. 8 that it would take about $6 billion in charges tied to its electric vehicle business, after its EV sales fell 43 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 once a $7,500 federal tax credit for EV buyers expired Sept. 30. The pullback raises questions about how fast GM will need the lithium that companies such as EnergyX are racing to produce.

The GM round was one piece of the roughly $151 million EnergyX has raised since 2018. The company has continued to lose money in the years since, and now leans on its public stock offering to keep its expansion plans funded.

Raising money from retail investors

To stay funded, EnergyX has leaned heavily on selling stock directly to the public. Since inception it has raised about $151 million through a mix of exempt securities offerings, including Regulation A+, crowdfunding and private placements, the filings show.

Its current fundraising runs through an online Regulation A+ offering, a format that lets companies sell shares to ordinary, non-wealthy investors without a stock-market listing. The shares are sold through broker-dealer DealMaker Securities at invest.energyx.com, with a minimum investment of $1,300.

The offering allows EnergyX to sell up to 2.85 million shares at $13 each, or about $37 million. As of April 1, the company had already sold about 3.67 million shares for roughly $36.6 million in the broader offering, which launched in July 2025. Regulation A caps how much a company can raise this way at $75 million in any 12-month period.

The price investors pay has risen steadily even though the company’s losses have grown. EnergyX started the offering at $10 a share in July 2025, raised it to $11 in October, to $12 in February and to $13 in April, an 18 percent increase in the latest step alone.

There is no public market for the stock, the company warns, and investors “should be prepared to hold their Shares indefinitely.” Sales of the shares also require board approval.

What investors should know

Several details in the filings stand out for anyone weighing an investment:

• A cut goes to the CEO, not the company. Up to 15 percent of every dollar raised, as much as $9.2 million if the offering sells out, goes directly to Egan as a selling shareholder, not to EnergyX. The company “will not receive those funds,” the filing states.
• New investors pay far more than insiders. Existing shareholders paid an average of about 85 cents a share. New investors are paying $13. Measured by net tangible book value, the filing pegs the immediate dilution to new investors at $12.41 a share.
• Founder keeps control. Egan controls about 63.7 percent of the company’s voting power. Common stockholders, the class sold in the offering, hold only about 17 percent of the vote and “have little ability to influence” major decisions.
• A lingering legal risk. The company disclosed that up to $28.4 million in shares sold during a window in late 2024 could carry a rescission right tied to a securities-compliance issue, meaning some investors might be entitled to demand their money back.

EnergyX says it intends to use the new money for commercialization, equipment, land and operating costs, and that the funding could carry it through at least the end of 2026.

EnergyX’s partner just changed hands

The other half of the proposed Texarkana plant has a complicated story of its own.

Wildcat Discovery Technologies, the San Diego company that would supply the cathode know-how, is a well-regarded name in battery research. Founded in 2006 by Scripps Research chemist Peter Schultz, it uses a high-throughput lab platform to screen thousands of material combinations and says it has run more than 225 projects for some 80 companies. It raised more than $90 million in earlier funding from backers including Koch Strategic Platforms and Eastman Kodak.

But Wildcat is no longer independent. In March, it was acquired for about $73 million by Holyvolt, a Swedish battery startup founded in 2022, in a deal made up of cash, equity and milestone payments. Wildcat is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Holyvolt, and the joint venture documents list the proposed plant site as Hooks.

Holyvolt is far younger and less proven than the company it bought. It remains pre-commercial, with no disclosed revenue, and spent most of its existence in stealth before a recent patent filing revealed details of its technology: a “water-based, screen-printed” battery the company says can be applied to almost any surface. It has raised a reported €12 million, or about $13 million, at a €182 million valuation, with backers that include Volvo and the Wallenberg family’s investment arm.

Whether that approach can work at industrial scale is an open question even among supporters. Battery manufacturing using screen-printing methods has drawn interest for years but has yet to be proven at mass-production scale.

The broader corner of the industry Holyvolt operates in has also seen controversy. A separate Finnish startup, Donut Lab, which markets its own screen-printed solid-state battery, faced fraud allegations in April after a whistleblower and more than 20 independent experts concluded its much-hyped product was a conventional lithium-ion cell rather than the breakthrough it claimed. Donut Lab has denied the allegations. Trade publications have reported rumors of a connection between Holyvolt and Donut Lab, but no link has been confirmed, and Holyvolt itself has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

For Texarkana, the takeaway is straightforward. The proposed plant would pair one company still raising money from small investors with another that just sold itself to a startup yet to prove its core technology at scale. The EnergyX-Wildcat proposal is one of several energy, defense and advanced-manufacturing projects circling the region, alongside development at Red River Army Depot and SkyFoundry. Whether this one gets built may come down to how much money EnergyX can raise, and from whom.

For more information on Texamericas Center see TXKtoday’s recent Texamericas Center Guide.

This story is based on TexAmericas Center’s June 23, 2026, news release and EnergyX’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its April 17, 2026, offering circular (Form 253G2), its 2025 Form 1-SA semiannual report and related documents.