News

Smart Batteries get £1.2 Million Series A Funding

November 04, 2015 by Jeff Shepard

Dukosi Ltd. has secured an additional £1.2 million of series A funding to accelerate the development and commercialization of their smart battery technology for high-efficiency automotive, renewable, grid and local energy storage. The latest investment round for Edinburgh-based Dukosi follows £1.0 million of investment received in late 2014 from existing shareholders lead by IP Group plc, with Par Equity and the Scottish Investment Bank.

The company’s electronics and software supervises and controls high-performance battery systems for electric and hybrid cars as well as grid energy storage and renewables applications such as wind and solar farms. The battery management systems ensures the safe operation of large batteries, optimizes their operational performance, and maintains the durability of the battery cells over many hears, or even decades, and thousands of charge cycles.

CEO, Dr. Gordon Povey said: “We are seeing significant growth in the lithium-ion battery markets worldwide largely driven by the increasing sales of electric and hybrid card. The demand for grid and renewables battery storage is also showing evidence of very strong growth. Every large lithium-ion battery system requires battery management technology and over the last two years we have been intensively developing our unique world-leading smart battery management technology that has now been demonstrated in a road-going electric vehicle. We will use this investment to enhance our technology, orientate the company for volume production and build our commercial pipeline.”

“We provide a fully-distributed battery system architecture with cell-level intelligence. Our technology is designed to be suitable for virtually any battery chemistry, any scale of battery system and application,” commented Joel Sylvester, CTO with Dukosi. “The hardware is identical for both automotive and grid applications, the core IP in the firmware and software is adapted to each battery application. We design optimal algorithms that run on a cell-by-cell -basis by using models developed with a leading UK university. Lithium-ion batteries were invented in the UK and we are fortunate to have unique access to some of the world leaders in the field of battery technology. It’s great to think that not only academics benefit from this investment, but potentially the UK economy too,” Sylvester continued.

Chairman, Clive Scrivener added, “By adding advanced cell modelling and power electronics enhancements, Dukosi is meeting the rapidly growing demands of the automotive and static energy storage industries for more efficient technology. Our disruptive, distributed, cell-level approach enables the company to deploy every more cost effective battery solutions to support an accelerating low-carbon economy. We believe they have a very bright future ahead of them.”