Sphere Energy aims to jumpstart the European EV industry with AI-powered battery brain

Sphere Energy is a German startup that has created a system that can simulate the behaviors of EV batteries. It can then use this data to extrapolate battery performance under different real-life scenarios, including road temperatures and different driving styles.

The company claims these AI-derived insights can reduce the average battery testing cycle by a minimum of one year. They estimate that accelerating battery testing could enable EVs to be developed twice as fast.

According to Sphere, this would see countless benefits for what’s often viewed as an EV industry lagging behind the juggernauts of the United States and China. Benefits include millions saved by manufacturers, reduced consumer prices, and exponential innovation growth.

Sphere co-founder Lukas Lutz said, “Nobody right now – not even Tesla – can accurately estimate the lifetime of their battery. This is something that will be really groundbreaking.”

The project was announced at the IBM Research Lab in Switzerland in January 2025. Sphere introduced its AI brain, which it’s dubbed “Batty.” The model was trained on testing data derived from more than a thousand batteries to simulate how long a specific battery would last under specific conditions.

Although the power of the Batty AI system is based on transformer architecture, which is what Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT are based on, Sphere doesn’t rely exclusively on text. It also incorporates time-series data, which is what allows it to simulate how a battery will perform over the years. Rather than predicting the next best word, Sphere predicts the next best data point.

The company claims that most of the continent’s leading vehicle manufacturers have already had the opportunity to test out the new system and have been impressed with the results. In these early stages, Batty could be the breakthrough European EV manufacturers need, as they rapidly lose out on global market share to China.

Lutz said, “Battery development is a huge pain for them – and it shouldn’t be. We really want to take away the burdens.”

Sphere claims that simulating battery life and behavior is just the beginning of its plans. It’s already making plans to bring its technology into other fields, including electric boats and electricity grid storage.

In time, this technological breakthrough could be the thing that gets European EV manufacturers back on track.