Brill powering its way to making batteries smarter with $10.5m Series A round

• Breakthrough intelligent battery management system saves money, spares increasingly rare materials and accelerates zero emissions
• Proven technology deployed in enterprise stationary storage and residential battery applications
• Investment will fund team growth and new product development for stationary energy storage and electric vehicles following a series of successful projects

Brill Power, an Oxford University spin-out company, announced the conclusion of its Series A round raising $10.5m today to support their mission to make batteries smarter, cleaner, safer and longer-lasting as a critical element of the shift to zero emissions energy. The funding will support team growth and new product development to expand presence in both static energy storage and the automotive sectors.

The round was led by two new blue-chip investors - Legal & General Capital and Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital Programme and supported by all of Brill’s existing investors including Oxford Science Enterprises, Oxford Investment Consultants, Big Rock Capital and Oxford University. Shell Ventures and Climate KIC have also become shareholders.

The investor confidence is driven by Brill Power’s pioneering development of a new way to manage batteries that suffers none of the limitations of previous methods. Brill’s optimised Active Loading method increases battery life by up to 60% and allows used batteries to discharge up to 46% more energy with a proprietary combination of hardware and intelligent software.

Brill Power’s technology is a key enabler for battery systems in applications including commercial & industrial on and off grid energy storage, residential batteries and electric vehicles in a battery market estimated at $400 billion by 2030 . Brill’s solutions are consistent with their new investor interests in partnering with enablers of clean energy generation including intermittent renewables as part of the wider shift to clean infrastructure, businesses and technologies.

Brill Power’s plans following investment round are threefold. The company will be doubling its team size across both engineering and commercial operations, while it will expand its product range for both static energy storage and for the world’s largest battery market – electric vehicles -  based on successful projects completed with Aston Martin, AMTE Power and Delta Cosworth. Finally, the funding will support the next phase in development of company’s data platform (BrillAnalytics) to help customers monitor and predict battery safety, health and performance data remotely.

Editor’s Note: No Joule Left Behind – An Explainer

Every battery needs a battery management system (BMS) to ensure batteries operate safely and effectively.

Until now, BMS haven fallen into two broad categories, both of which impose limitations on battery system operations. One approach, active balancing BMS, are inherently expensive and therefore are not a scalable proposition for mass application, whereas more affordable passive balancing solutions introduce operating inefficiencies and wider safety consideration into battery control. Brill Power’s approach offers a third way that overcomes the limitations of these traditional BMS architectures.

Brill Power’s Active Loading method represents a step-change for BMS through proprietary algorithms that determine the state of health and power capability of every parallel-connected cell block in the battery with novel control circuitry to regulate the electric current accordingly. Stronger cell blocks are exposed to higher currents and weaker ones to lower currents. This ensures that every joule of energy is extracted from each individual cell during every discharge cycle. As a result, no single cell becomes the limiting factor in the energy storage capacity, power capability or lifetime of the battery system.

Brill’s proprietary Active Loading method BMS offers significant performance, cost of ownership, durability and safety benefits that are available to battery systems developers immediately, negating the need for expensive R&D into new battery chemistries.

The benefits of Brill Power’s BMS technologies include:

• Up to 60% increase in battery lifetime
• Up to 46% more energy for used batteries
• BMS provides fully regulated output voltage, removing the requirement for costly DC/DC converters or charge controllers
• BMS allows for battery maintenance and augmentation without shutdown
• The BMS is future-proof for new battery chemistries and 2nd life batteries
• The BMS provides a cloud-based analytics platform for remote system analysis and optimisation