Few markets are moving as rapidly as China’s automotive sector. There, new models are rolled out in as little as 18 months, putting tremendous pressure on legacy Western automakers, which need four-plus years to go from concept to sales floor.
“With the increasingly short development cycles in China, it’s driving a huge amount of cost and time focus,” Ian Campbell, co-founder and CEO of Breathe Battery Technologies, told TechCrunch. “In both geographies, in the East — in China and Asia — and in the West as well.”
Much of that focus has been centered around batteries — the components that can make or break electric vehicle sales. Automakers are forced to predict where the market will be a few years out, but those forecasts don’t always pan out given how quickly the EV landscape is evolving.
Making changes to physical components can be expensive and unpredictable, which is why Campbell’s startup has been trying to give batteries more flexibility via software.
Breathe has developed a suite of tools that Campbell said helps automakers and others get the most out of their batteries. The startup recently raised a $21 million Series B led by Kinnevik Online AB, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Lowercarbon Capital and Volvo Cars Tech Fund participated.
The new funding will help Breathe continue to push its software earlier in the battery development process. The company currently has four products: Design, Model, Map, and Charge.
Charge was Breathe’s first offering, and it optimized charging strategies to speed refilling or increase the longevity of a battery.
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Though battery manufacturing is tightly controlled, no two cells that roll of the line are 100% identical. As a result, some might generate more heat during fast charging, while others might be able to withstand more charge and discharge cycles than their peers.
Chinese mobile phone maker Oppo was the first to adopt it, and the software cut charging time by 27%. On the automotive side, Volvo has Breathe’s code installed on its forthcoming ES90 sedan, helping it to charge 10% to 80% in 20 minutes. In essence, Breathe’s software lets them make the most of each cell given its individual quirks.
The startup’s other offerings help automakers and electronics companies design and predict how their batteries will perform years down the line, letting them determine where to invest development resources. For example, if a new chemistry is lower cost and looks to have a longer lifespan, then designers may decide to let it charge a little faster at the expense of some of that longevity.
“They want to understand what room they have and what will happen when they make trade offs throughout the development program of their battery system,” Campbell said.
To do that, Breathe has built a lab in London where it can run a range of tests on batteries its customers are interested in using. In as little as four weeks, it has enough to ship the customer a model (called Breathe Model) that can simulate likely future performance.
After that, the cells stay on in the lab, contributing more data so that Breathe can eventually ship the customer its Map product, which augments simulated data with more real world results, Campbell said. The Design product will round out the suite when its released in the coming months, providing a customers with set of software tools to speed — you guessed it — battery design.
The goal is to reduce the amount of “brute force lab testing” needed to bring a battery to market, Campbell said. He likens Breathe’s software tools to those used in the semiconductor industry, which have helped companies like Apple and Nvidia work closely with foundries like TSMC to implement their processor designs in silicon.
“We want to try and do for batteries what we’ve seen the simulation software from Cadence and Synopsis do so effectively in semiconductor design,” he said.
