Powering Britain's
Battery Revolution
Powering Britain's
Battery Revolution
The Entrepreneurial Fellowship programme supports researchers across the UK looking to create new businesses and commercialise battery technologies. Fellowships receive mentoring, strategic business advice and introductions to key industry contacts.
Image: Ocrea Energy team. From left to right: Shunli He, Ji Hu, Yaoguang Song (CEO) Alex Rettie and Tommy Gill.
Introducing the new Fellowships:
ENV Energy, a spin out from the University of Warwick, has developed a novel cathode material capable of improving the performance of current lithium-ion batteries and reducing manufacturing costs. The development is founded on a deep understanding of the fundamental mechanisms that govern the behaviour of next-generation lithium-ion battery cathodes developed as part of the FutureCat project by WMG. The innovation is a drop-in cathode material that delivers performance improvements, reduces manufacturing complexity, and enhances safety. It is compatible with existing cell designs, and requires no unique electrolytes or formation protocols, enabling faster integration into high-value applications including EVs aerospace, and defence.
The team recently secured a pre-seed investment round, accelerating progress towards commercialisation. The Fellowship will support efforts to quantify the techno-economic benefits of the new material and help to develop the team and partnerships required for commercialisation, supporting the UK Battery Strategy and strengthening domestic capability in advanced battery manufacturing.
Matt Ogley and Louis Piper (left to right).
Ocrea Energy is developing a scalable coating technology that has the potential to improve interface stability and ion transport efficiency. It could contribute to a significant improvement in the energy and power density, cost, lifetime, predictability, and safety of next-generation batteries including all-solid-state and high-silicon anodes.
The technology uses lithium-conductive coatings as artificial solid-electrolyte interphase (SEI) layers with tuneable thicknesses from nanometres to microns. The coating layers are solution-processable, use off-the-shelf precursor salts, and are compatible with industrial coating techniques enabling seamless integration into current manufacturing for electrodes, current collectors and battery cells. This approach offers a low-cost, manufacturable, sustainable and scalable alternative to vacuum-deposited interlayers. It has the potential to provide an interface engineering solution that enables battery manufacturers to integrate high-performance chemistries without costly manufacturing retooling or cell architecture redesign.
This Entrepreneurial Fellowship will support Ocrea’s R&D and technology validation, commercial deployment, IP protection and spin-out from UCL.
DandeLiion Technologies Ltd, which is spinning out from the Universities of Southampton and Portsmouth, provides advanced, physics-based battery modelling software. Its products include: (i) a fast battery management tool designed to simulate physics-based models of vehicle battery cells within the constrained computational environment of an on-board system; (ii) a 3D thermal-electrochemical design tool capable of simulating large pouch, cylindrical and prismatic cells, and battery packs. The design platform enables users to run simulations seamlessly in the cloud. Its architecture is highly scalable. The program is faster than alternatives and is powerful enough to conduct extremely large simulations. This combination of speed, scalability, and computational power positions DandeLiion as a potent tool for accelerating battery development cycles and improving both performance and system-level understanding.
In late 2023, DandeLiion entered into a technology licensing agreement with About:Energy, a UK-based innovator in battery parameterisation. DandeLiion’s equivalent circuit modelling software has been integrated into About:Energy’s Voltt platform, establishing an initial early revenue stream.
The entrepreneurial fellowship will enable the team to develop a robust application programming interface to enhance integration into customer workflows, identify new customers, refine pricing strategy, and define the technical and commercial roadmap required to scale the business.
The DandeLiion team (left to right) Giles Richardson (Co-founder & Executive Lead), Susan Robertson (Chair & Strategy Adviser), Jamie Foster (Co-founder & Scientific Adviser), Smita Sahu (Co-founder & Operational Lead) and Ivan Korotkin (Co-founder & Technical Lead).
Posted on June 10, 2026