Helping EV and smartphone batteries charge faster and last longer, London’s Breathe Battery Technologies raises £1.5 million.

London-based startup Helping EV and smartphone batteries charge faster and last longer, London’s Breathe Battery Technologies has raised £1.5 million in a seed funding round. A spinout of Imperial College London’s Electrochemical Science & Engineering group, Breath builds and deploys intelligent battery management algorithms specifically targeted at smartphones and electric vehicles. The funding is slated to be used to further scale-up operations and accelerate said deployments.

Breath is founded by academic heavyweights Dr. Yan Zhao, Dr. Ian Campbell and Professor Greg Offer, principal investigator and lead of the £17.9 million budget of the Faraday Institution multi-scale modelling programme. Breathe digs deep into battery health and analytics and joins competitors TWAICE and Accure in the race to juice the most out of the juice. However, where the startup aims to make its mark is in its health-adaptive charging software, Lincc.

According to the startup, Lincc is the first battery management software to bring battery physics and battery models that traditionally can only be run on powerful workstation or desktop computing environments to the low-power, low-cost microcontrollers in electric vehicles and consumer electronics. Ultimately, what this means is that manufacturers can bring electric vehicles to market cheaper and faster, by replacing traditional, experimental trial and error approaches to battery management development.

“Faster charging times and a longer battery lifetime make EVs more attractive, reducing barriers to adoption,” commented CTO Dr. Yan Zhao. “And because batteries don’t need to be made bigger to compensate for degradation over time, warranty costs are reduced, lowering the manufacturer’s costs and helping to make EVs cheaper to buy.”

And it’s not just any battery-involved brands we’re talking about, as Breathe has contracts with smartphone maker Oppo and Porsche-backed EV company Rimac. Could we see the technology make it into GreyP bikes soon as well, as Porsche has recently acquired a majority stake in the Rimac-related brand?

Breath Battery Technology’s £1.5 million seed round was Led by Speedinvest, and saw participation from angel investors including Pete Hutton, former president of product groups at Arm; Adrien Cohen, co-founder and president at unicorn Tractable; Benno Jering, partner at Redline Capital; Paul Massara, ex-Centrica and RWE Executive Member, and Peter Murphy, co-founder of Covalis Capital and a leading investor in the energy transition field.

“The battery market is at an inflection point and Breathe Battery Technologies is addressing some of the biggest challenges to make batteries more efficient and reduce waste. We were impressed by the unique ‘health-adaptive charging’ technology approach, the deep battery expertise of the team, and the growing market demand. In addition to vehicles, almost every application using lithium-ion batteries could benefit from the technology,” concluded Speedinvest’s Rick Hao.