Glimpse: Battery Scanning Company Raises $4 Million

By Amit Chowdhry ● Mar 11, 2024

Glimpse – a provider of battery quality monitoring solutions for battery producers and electric mobility companies – announced its official launch and initial capital raise of $4 million. The company also announced the release of its high-throughput battery X-ray scanning service.

Glimpse raised $4 million in seed funding from venture capital firms Ibex Mobility and Flybridge Capital Partners and a syndicate of battery and EV angel investors. And the company’s three co-founders, who have collectively worked at Tesla, Toyota, and various electric mobility startups – bringing over 25 years of experience in several aspects of battery technology, including cell design, modeling, and manufacturing.

Glimpse developed a scalable, collaborative, and cost-efficient battery quality monitoring platform to help battery producers and buyers save billions of dollars in production scrap, battery pack field failures, and fleet recalls. And to address the challenge of enabling battery quality at scale, Glimpse harnesses X-ray CT scanning, the industrial equivalent of CAT scanning used in the medical field. The company’s timely launch aligns with the unprecedented Gigafactory and EV boom in the United States, driven by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

The Glimpse Portal (a secure web application) enables Glimpse’s existing customers to continuously monitor their battery quality through high-resolution cross-section images and an automated inspection layer that extracts key quality features. And to highlight its high-throughput CT scanning capabilities, Glimpse has just unveiled a free 1000-cell demo available on its portal.

Until now, CT scanning predominantly served as a low-volume lab instrument for battery producers and electric mobility companies – primarily for R&D and sporadic failure analysis purposes. With ongoing partnerships with leading North American and European scanner manufacturers, Glimpse is redesigning CT scanning’s hardware and software stacks in building a battery quality monitoring platform compatible with high-volume cell production and assembly environments.
Glimpse was already able to increase the technology’s throughput and reduce its cost by factors of 30 and 20, respectively. And the team is working with its partners on the next set of hardware and software improvements that will deliver another 10-fold increase in throughput.

KEY QUOTES:

“Just like critical minerals and production capacity, battery quality is a major bottleneck to the electrification of everything. 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.”

– Glimpse co-founder and CEO Eric Moch

“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.”

– Peter Attia, Glimpse co-founder and CTO, who focused his Stanford PhD on battery lifetime prediction

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