CeLLife's EIC Accelerator Grades a Battery Cell in Two Seconds

Up to a third of the cells produced in a battery factory are discarded as defective, and the tests that would catch them earlier are slow and expensive enough that only a small share of production gets them. CeLLife Technologies, a 2022 spin-off of Tampere University, measures what it calls a cell's electrical fingerprint: more than 2,000 data points in about two seconds, compared by machine learning against a database of millions of measurements to identify the cell's type and chemistry and flag the ones in poor condition.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, PerBatt, at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,498,753 from October 2025 to September 2027 to develop the platform for industrial scale, across chemistries and form factors, for new and used cells. The economics in the project are stark: an average European gigafactory producing up to 30% scrap loses an estimated €720 million of revenue a year, and the company says its platform can cut scrap by up to 30%.

Why battery factories scrap so much

A gigafactory's yield problem is partly a measurement problem. Full electrical characterisation of a cell takes hours of charging and discharging, so manufacturers sample rather than test everything, and defective cells either get through or good ones get thrown away with the bad. Faster grading also matters at the other end of a battery's life, where a recycler has to decide which used cells can be reused, and the project covers new and used cells alike.

The market framing is the sector's standard one: battery sales doubling every two to three years for three decades, 5.5 to 8 terawatt hours a year by 2030 worth more than €550 billion, and an addressable market for diagnostics of €5.7 billion by 2030.

Prototypes, and no named customer

The project puts the platform at technology readiness level 6, with prototypes tested with leading industry companies that it does not name. The company said in 2024 that it had notable clients and had begun cooperation with leading electric vehicle manufacturers, also unnamed, and that it was growing in Finland, Sweden and Germany. In August 2025 it was named among the top ten winners of the European Startup Prize for Mobility, with the associated funding earmarked for wider deployment in European gigafactories and better integration with manufacturing lines.

What is absent is the figure a battery manufacturer would ask for first: how accurately the two-second measurement predicts what a multi-hour test would have found. No validation study, correlation or false-negative rate has been published, and CORDIS shows no periodic report.

1. Fast measurementDemonstratedMore than 2,000 data points in about two seconds, per the company.
2. Industrial prototypesTRL 6Tested with industry companies the project does not name.
3. Accuracy against full testingNot publishedNo validation study or error rate in public.
4. 30% scrap reduction at a customerClaimNo gigafactory deployment reported.

Small money for a software product

CeLLife raised €2 million in June 2024 led by the pan-European fund Ventech, with Grid.VC and angels, after earlier research support from Business Finland dating back to 2021. Secondary reports describe the EIC award as a €2.5 million grant with potential co-investment of up to €6 million; CORDIS records only the grant, and no EIC Fund investment has been announced. As a cloud service rather than a hardware supplier, the company needs less capital than most in this cut-off, which makes the grant proportionally larger.

The project's case: gigafactory yield

The project's case is that scrap, more than demand, is a cost for European battery manufacturing, and that a factory scrapping up to a third of its output loses an estimated €720 million of revenue a year. Diagnostics that catch defects in seconds rather than hours is therefore a direct answer to the problem the project describes, and it is also exportable. That is why this project's clean air, climate, digital and AI trackers all sit at 40%, and why a Finnish measurement company is a reasonable thing for the EIC to fund.