Partnering with battery software specialists enables OEMs to enhance battery performance, accelerate development cycles, and optimise product economics in ways that in-house teams struggle to match.
By Oskar Nordlander, Product Manager, Breathe Battery Technologies
Software Dilemma at the Heart of Electrification
As the automotive industry scales electrification, OEMs face strategic decisions about where to invest and who to partner with. Battery performance, durability and cost sits at the centre of these choices.
The critical question: build battery software capabilities in-house or partner with specialists? On paper, building in-house offers control and differentiation. In reality, it demands deep electrochemical expertise, modelling talent, and validation infrastructure that are costly to maintain and slow to scale.
Even large OEMs are re-evaluating which parts of the battery software stack to develop internally and where physics-based partners can deliver better results faster.
What It Takes to Build software for creating high-performance battery cells
Developing advanced battery software isn’t a coding exercise. It requires three distinct capabilities:
- Design and simulation. Engineers need tools to design battery cells and systems, then simulate their behaviour under real-world conditions. This means understanding electrochemical and thermal dynamics before hardware exists.
- Physics-based modelling. Teams must predict how different chemistries, materials and dimensions will perform, identify trade-offs, and optimise bill of materials costs. This requires specialist knowledge that’s scarce in the market.
- Adaptive control. Software must dynamically manage charging and operation in real-time, adjusting to each battery’s condition to balance speed, safety, and longevity.
Building all three capabilities internally requires:
- Cell and sub-level laboratories and diagnostic tools to characterise behaviour across chemistries
- Simulation environments for virtual testing and algorithm optimisation
- Continuous updates to keep pace with new cell formats and materials
- Critically: top-tier modelling engineers, a talent pool that’s extremely limited
This is a formidable challenge. Batteries represent around 40% of an EV’s total cost, so every percentage point of performance or cost improvement matters. But the barrier isn’t just capital – it’s talent. Building a world-class modelling team takes years and requires recruiting from a shallow pool of specialists.
The Talent Gap
Here’s the reality: there simply aren’t enough expert battery modelling engineers to go around. OEMs competing to build these teams internally face extended timelines and high opportunity costs.
Specialists like Breathe have spent years assembling these teams. Our modelling group was built from scratch in roughly two years and now includes around ten top-tier engineers focused exclusively on advancing battery software. That concentrated expertise is difficult for any single OEM to replicate while also managing their core business.
What Do Partnerships Unlock?
Partnering with battery software specialists addresses the talent gap while delivering three key benefits:
Performance: Adaptive charging software improves charging speeds without hardware redesign or chemistry changes. By modelling the cell’s true electrochemical limits, it dynamically controls charging power to reduce degradation and heat.
Accelerated development: These tools enable OEMs to design cells, explore trade-offs, and validate performance virtually. This accelerates the industrialisation of known chemistries—getting proven technologies to market faster rather than waiting for the next breakthrough.
Product economics: Physics-based simulation helps optimise bill of materials for a customer’s chosen chemistry, reducing costs without compromising performance. Small improvements in BOM efficiency translate to significant savings at scale.
Importantly, customers retain full ownership of their data for validation and learning. The partnership model doesn’t mean losing visibility, it means gaining depth.
De-risking Development
Beyond talent and speed, partnerships also reduce technical risk. The pace of battery innovation is accelerating. New materials like silicon-dominant anodes deliver higher energy density but introduce complex dynamic behaviours. Managing these safely requires algorithms that predict and control electrochemical reactions in real-time.
Specialist partners bring perspective from working across multiple chemistries and OEM programmes. This broader view enables faster adaptation as new technologies emerge – a challenge that isolated in-house teams face alone.
By engaging partners early, OEMs can use simulation to identify performance bottlenecks, explore how the bill of materials (BOM) can be reduced, and shorten the path from prototype to production. The result: faster time to market with continuously improving software, without the overhead of building and maintaining everything internally.
Learning from Other Partnerships
This specialist partnership model isn’t unprecedented in automotive. Audio systems are a familiar example: OEMs collaborate with companies like Harman Kardon or Bang & Olufsen to deliver premium experiences that enhance vehicle value. The same applies to adaptive cruise control, autonomous features, and other customer-facing technologies.
Battery technology is heading in this direction. As EVs mature, differentiation will come from efficiency, longevity, and charging performance—all driven by software. OEMs who embrace specialised collaboration early will set the pace for the next generation of vehicles.
How to Partner for Advantage
The future of EV performance will be defined by software control, not chemistry alone. OEMs who blend their system integration strengths with the physics-based insight of specialised partners will unlock new levels of performance and cost efficiency.
The question isn’t simply build or buy – it’s how to partner strategically. Those who combine in-house expertise with simulation-driven software and access to scarce modelling talent will lead the market in the years ahead.
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