Problem:
Widespread uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) is essential to reducing global emissions, but is currently hindered by EV battery performance, safety and associated cost. Breathe creates software for EV batteries that markedly improves these characteristics without requiring expensive and time-consuming hardware changes.
Solution:
The health of a battery naturally deteriorates over the course of its lifetime. Breathe’s software monitors the health of the battery during its operation and uses this information to manage the battery intelligently, minimising degradation. This leads to enhanced vehicle performance, charging rate and safety. These benefits can be used flexibly, from creating much greater battery lifetime to enabling the use of cheaper batteries to lower project costs.
Breathe’s vision is to have an install-base of millions of units, improving the performance of all high-value systems reliant on batteries. It aims to be recognised as the provider of an essential battery management technology for any new battery pack. It is currently trialling its product with OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and is hoping to deploy the software commercially in the next 12 months.
Breathe has demonstrated the effectiveness of its novel battery management software in a representative vehicle environment using commercially available batteries. Breathe’s software, which controls the current flow in and out of batteries, has demonstrated its ability to firstly extend the life of that battery by 2.4 times compared to conventional methods. It also increases the average vehicle range of that battery over its lifetime by as much as 5%. The technology is the subject of an ongoing patent application.
Traction:
- Winner of Environmental and Energy track at Imperial College London flagship venture competition Venture Catalyst Challenge.
- Breath is funded by The Faraday Institution, Innovate UK, EIT Climate-KIC.
- Secured new office space, grown team, began a second CE pilot contract and closed the majority of a seed round in 2021.