Glimpse, a provider of battery quality monitoring solutions for battery producers and electric mobility companies, raised $4 million in a seed funding round from venture capital firms Ibex Mobility and Flybridge Capital Partners and a syndicate of battery and EV angel investors.
The company has created a battery quality monitoring platform. This platform is stated to be scalable, collaborative, and cost-efficient, aiming to assist battery producers and buyers in saving significant amounts of money by reducing production scrap, battery pack failures, and fleet recalls.
To address this, Glimpse utilizes X-ray CT scanning, which is akin to CAT scanning in the medical field. The company’s launch coincides with the surge in Gigafactories and electric vehicles (EVs) in the United States, driven by legislative acts such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
“Just like critical minerals and production capacity, battery quality is a major bottleneck to the electrification of everything,” said Glimpse co-founder and CEO Eric Moch. “X-ray CT scanning, with its ability to generate a high-resolution map of an object’s internal structure, is one of the best available technologies to comprehensively determine the build quality of a battery cell.”
The Glimpse Portal, a web application, allows Glimpse’s existing customers to continuously monitor their battery quality through high-resolution cross-section images and an automated inspection layer.
“In many cases, attempting to detect a latent battery defect with electrochemical tests is akin to trying to find an early-stage tumor by measuring a patient’s blood pressure and heart rate. While these conventional battery inspection tests can certainly inform diagnosis, CT scanning can unambiguously identify hidden defects in battery cells,” said Peter Attia, Glimpse co-founder and CTO.
According to Mercom’s Annual and Q4 2023 Funding and M&A Report for Storage & Smart Grid, Venture capital (VC/PE) funding in Energy Storage in 2023 was the highest ever recorded, increasing 59% year-over-year (YoY), with $9.2 billion in 86 deals compared to the $5.8 billion raised in 96 deals in 2022.
