AcouBatt, a deeptech startup, has raised £1.1 million in pre-seed funding led by Creator Fund, with participation from Ada Ventures. Spun out of UCL Ventures, AcouBatt applies acoustic emission sensing and proprietary AI to reveal what is happening inside a lithium-ion battery cell as it is being made.
Battery manufacturers currently have almost no real-time visibility into a cell during production. During formation, where a cell is first charged and discharged, cells sit for up to two weeks while manufacturers wait, blind to whether the cell is forming correctly. The result is severe bottlenecks, up to 30% of cells being rejected, and a constant risk of defective cells slipping through quality control. Acting as a stethoscope for the production line, AcouBatt's sensors pick up the acoustic signals generated by electrochemical and mechanical processes inside the cell, and its AI separates meaningful battery activity from background noise to interpret changes in behaviour as they happen. Synchronising that activity with electrochemical data pinpoints when key formation processes are complete, letting manufacturers ditch conservative time buffers and speed up formation by up to 30% without impacting performance. The same signals flag the earliest signatures of a developing fault and catch process deviations before an entire batch is completed. Beyond the factory floor, the technology can be deployed in battery energy storage systems to identify underperforming or failing cells before they cause safety incidents or unplanned downtime.
Demand for lithium-ion batteries is surging to power electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage and consumer electronics, and Western governments are investing heavily to break China's 80% dominance of the manufacturing market. Last year the UK government announced a £452 million investment into the battery manufacturing sector through the Battery Innovation Programme, part of its Industrial Strategy.
Founded in 2025 by Arthur Fordham and Chris Haoxin Xu, who met through London Business School's Innovation to Market programme, AcouBatt is underpinned by Fordham's PhD research at University College London's Electrochemical Innovation Lab, supported by the Faraday Institution as part of the SafeBatt project. Sensors are currently deployed within the lab of the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, the UK's national battery scale-up facility, where the diagnostics are being benchmarked ahead of commercial products next year.
The funding will expand the technical team, continue development of the AI models and progress the industrial pilot programme with battery manufacturers.
Batteries are the foundation of modern infrastructure, yet up until now, they have been tightly locked in a black box. That is why advanced diagnostics are the next major frontier. AcouBatt provides a diagnostic tool that not only saves massive amounts of time on the factory floor but helps manufacturers and operators truly understand and look after their battery systems from the moment they are formed to the end of their working life.
Western battery manufacturers are under immense pressure to scale and innovate at speed, while keeping safety and cost top of mind. Our technology opens the door for manufacturers to drastically cut waste, optimise their processes, and bring safer, better batteries to the market more quickly.
Battery manufacturing is becoming a strategic priority for almost every major economy and global demand is surging to support EVs, grid-scale storage, and electronics. But global demand is accelerating faster than manufacturers' ability to guarantee quality at scale. So much battery innovation comes out of China, that it is great to see cutting edge UK technology in the field, drawing on UCL's excellence in acoustic sensing. Acoubatt has been developed to actually work on the factory floor – it is not destructive, it does not change anything in the manufacturing process, but allows producers to understand what is happening inside their batteries at speed.
If we're serious about electrifying everything, we can't keep scrapping battery cells, principally because manufacturers can't see inside the battery formation black boxes. AcouBatt has changed this in a way that no-one else has been able to, which is exactly why we invested.
