AcouBatt, a London deeptech startup spun out of UCL Ventures, has raised £1.1M in pre-seed funding led by Creator Fund, with participation from Ada Ventures.
Battery makers have little real-time visibility into what happens inside a cell as it is built. During formation, when a cell is first charged and discharged, cells can sit for up to two weeks while manufacturers wait to find out whether they formed correctly. That creates bottlenecks, and up to 30% of cells can end up rejected. Defective cells can still slip through quality control.
AcouBatt's answer is to listen. Its sensors capture the acoustic signals generated by electrochemical and mechanical processes inside the cell, and its AI filters out background noise to read how the cell is behaving. Synchronised with electrochemical data, the signals show when formation steps are finished, which the company says lets manufacturers drop conservative time buffers and cut formation time by up to 30% without affecting performance. They also flag early signs of a fault and process deviations before a whole batch is complete. The same technology can be used in battery energy storage systems to identify underperforming cells before they cause safety incidents or downtime.
AcouBatt was founded in 2025 by Arthur Fordham and Chris Haoxin Xu, who met through London Business School's Innovation to Market programme. It builds on Fordham's PhD research at UCL's Electrochemical Innovation Lab, supported by the Faraday Institution's SafeBatt project. Sensors are deployed in the lab at 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. No customer or revenue figures have been disclosed, and this is the company's first reported round. Fordham said batteries have until now been "tightly locked in a black box".
The timing is helpful. Demand for lithium-ion cells is rising across electric vehicles, grid storage and consumer electronics, and Western governments are trying to loosen China's roughly 80% share of manufacturing. The UK government announced a £452M investment in battery manufacturing last year through the Battery Innovation Programme. The new money will go towards growing the technical team, developing the AI models and progressing industrial pilots with battery manufacturers. Creator Fund CEO Jamie Macfarlane said the technology is non-destructive and does not change the manufacturing process.
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