Voltaiq eyes smarter EV batteries

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich.—Batteries should no longer be treated like traditional vehicle components, manufactured like widgets and shipped into the ether. They're more akin to newborn babies.

Much like DNA, batteries' underlying chemistries and manufacturing processes shape their performance and reliability. How they behave in the real world, however, depends on how they're nurtured. For example, do they sit in high heat? Or, are they repeatedly charged at fast chargers?

"They're unlike any other component in our modern devices right now," said Tal Sholklapper, co-founder of Berkeley, Calif., battery intelligence provider Voltaiq. "Everything else is mechanical or semiconductors. These are more like living beings."

As such, he says, auto makers should do a better job monitoring battery health. But at a time in which President Biden and major car companies have etched ambitious electric vehicle sales targets for the years ahead, few auto makers have such capabilities.

Voltaiq intends to change that. The company's platform collects more than 80 metrics from batteries on their origins, chemistries and ongoing performance. Usually kept in disparate repositories that are difficult to access, the data can be combined and analyzed to better detect problems, distill insights and predict reliability.

Such intelligence is ever-more valuable. Battery-related recalls can cost millions: Hyundai's recall of its Kona electric vehicles cost the auto maker approximately $900 million this year. Worse, battery fires such as the ones experienced by Chevy Bolts that prompted a more recent recall can lead to safety concerns and awkward requests that car owners park their vehicles outside, which undermine confidence in EVs just as sales are supposed to proliferate.

While thwarting recalls is perhaps the most obvious use for Voltaiq's platform, it also can be used throughout design and production, helping auto makers evaluate suppliers and explore chemistries and designs at a pace that matches the targets they've set around electrification.

"It can take years to arrive at the final battery cell that you're going to put into a vehicle," Sholklapper said.

"We can help accelerate that process, significantly streamline it, and get deeper insights into the batteries. … With how sensitive they are, temperature, usage patterns, suppliers, new chemistries. All of that comes into play, and you can't model your way out of the problems."

Sholklapper met Voltaiq co-founder Eli Leland while the two worked on separate Department of Energy projects in a New York laboratory. Quickly, they realized they had a common problem: Finding a way to cull data from battery testing felt next to impossible. Asking other colleagues if they had programs they used to make sense of data, they found no answers.

"We developed our own in-house capability to do some of this data management and analysis, and it was literally just a script running on a five- or 15-minute timer on an old discarded PC in the corner of the lab that would basically scrape all the data coming out of the battery cyclers and put it into a web page," Leland said.

"This was the engine powering the entire multimillion-dollar R&D project."

In a previous job in an unrelated field, Leland worked for a company that sold software that helped businesses make sense of sales numbers. He knew companies paid tens of millions for that software. Voltaiq was founded in 2012 and has raised $11.6 million to date, per Crunchbase records.

For a while, the company was ahead of its time. "There were definitely years of getting eyes glazing over when we said we worked in analytics and software for batteries," Leland said. But as electric vehicles established a firmer place on the automotive horizon in recent years, the company gained commercial traction.

Voltaiq says it's working with Mercedes-Benz and two Detroit auto makers, in addition to some of the biggest companies in tech: Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Its advisory board includes former General Motors executives Carl-Peter Forster, Ralph Szygenda and Bob Galyen. The board also includes execs with experience at Mitsubishi Motors and Tata Motors."

Battery intelligence isn't limited to the automotive industry. Voltaiq's platform works across industries, capable of analyzing batteries for phones, medical devices, consumer electronics and more.

But the company's leaders have zeroed in on automotive as a key area. With growth ahead, it's more important than ever companies understand batteries and treat them less like common parts and more like complex beings.

"When the battery is charging and discharging, you've got billions of lithium ions that are going from one side of the battery to the other," Leland said. "It's almost like it's breathing."