What happens when you can create virtual cells?
Tomas Juergensen
Batteries power the products that move us, connect us, and shape our future.
But the way we design them has not kept pace with the urgency of our ambitions.
Sony commercialised the first lithium-ion rechargeable battery cell in 1991. Thirty-four years later, cell development is still locked in cycles of trial and error. Iterations happen in laboratories. R&D lines, testing, data processing, and communicating results all take months for a single loop.
Critical data and expertise remain behind supplier walls and silo-ed teams. And if you are buying cells from a supplier, you are often a passenger in the process, watching from the side lines as choices are made that will define your product’s performance for years.
What happens when you can step into the driver’s seat?
What happens when you can answer the big design questions yourself in minutes, not months?
From passive to proactive
In traditional development, even the most capable battery teams are constrained. You can model a pack. You can tweak your BMS. But the cell itself, the beating heart of your system, is a black box. You get datasheets. You run your own tests. And you wait.
Meanwhile, variability between batches, changes in production lines, and shifts in supplier priorities create uncertainty. That uncertainty is risk. And when timelines are tight, risk means delays, redesigns, and missed opportunities.
This creates an imbalance of influence and objective. A cell supplier can dramatically impact the performance of your product with design decisions, but their goal is to fulfil a cell-level specification. Your goal is to deliver the best possible product to your customers, yet your influence is largely limited to squeezing performance from the cell you are given.
Breathe Design changes that dynamic. It connects cell design choices directly to product performance. It gives you a window into the cell and the ability to experiment with it digitally before it ever exists.
Virtual cells, real decisions
Breathe Design is a digital cell design tool built for speed, clarity, and control.
Through a simple, easy-to-use interface, it lets your team run complex simulations in the time it takes to make a coffee.
You can change electrode composition and thickness, tweak porosity, adjust the N/P ratio, or explore new form factors, and instantly predict the resulting performance. Imagine seeing a clear before-and-after, parameters adjusted, KPIs shifting, insights appearing in real time.
These performance metrics tell part of the story. Breathe Design can also generate physics-based cell models from your virtual designs. This enables dynamic simulations to predict performance in real-world scenarios, such as fast charging, heat generation under heavy load, and runtime during demanding duty cycles.
What we are most excited about is how these virtual cells integrate into pack and system-level simulations. You can explore hundreds of scenarios without building a single prototype, adjust design parameters, generate a cell model, and simulate system performance in minutes. This creates a connected workflow where system and cell design happen together, not in isolation.
Connect cell design decisions to product level performance using battery design software
The result is better price-to-performance optimisation, fewer blind spots, and a higher likelihood of first-shot success.
Connecting cell and system
Today, cell and system design often exist in separate worlds. One is handled by your supplier’s R&D team and the other by yours.
This separation forces compromise on both sides.
Breathe Design closes that gap. By providing accurate, physics-based cell models that integrate seamlessly into your workflows, it turns the relationship with your supplier from one-directional to collaborative. You can run simulations that inform your requirements, challenge assumptions with data, and arrive at a design that works for both the cell and the system faster, with less risk, and at a better cost.
Minutes, not months
Speed is not only about efficiency. It unlocks new possibilities.
When you can iterate quickly, you can explore more of the design space. You can test bold ideas without the penalty of long delays. You can pivot when market needs change, instead of committing to a cell that is already outdated by the time it reaches production.
Breathe Design turns the long, slow cadence of cell development into a rapid, digital conversation between design choices and performance outcomes. That means fewer surprises, fewer delays, and products that reach the market in the right form at the right time.
Why this matters now
The race to electrify transport, decarbonise grids, and expand storage is accelerating.
Every delay in development has a cost, in lost market share, in missed climate targets.
Breathe Design gives battery teams the ability to move at digital speed.
It is not just about designing better cells. It is about designing them in a way that matches the pace and scale of the challenges ahead.
A strategic advantage
When you can create virtual cells, you do not just reduce risk, you redefine your relationship with it. You can explore more options without slowing down. You can de-risk your first production run without adding months to your schedule. You can make confident, data-backed decisions without relying solely on supplier timelines.
And that means you can launch faster, with more certainty, and with a product that truly delivers.
Your turn
Breathe Design is built for battery teams that want more agency, more clarity, and more speed in the cell design process. Whether you are developing custom cells or optimising off-the-shelf options, it puts the tools in your hands to influence outcomes from day one.
So what happens when you can create virtual cells?
You stop waiting for the future.
You start building it.