Take the one that sidelined every Chevy Bolt made between 2017 and 2022: A problem at an LG battery factory caused some parts inside the cells to be installed improperly, which ultimately cost LG $1.9 billion. Pretty much every major manufacturer has to deal with recalls. In the EV space alone, Volkswagen, Stellantis, Hyundai, Toyota and others have all suffered through them.
And the reason why they weren’t is because it’s way too slow to do any kind of statistical sampling,” Eric Moch, co-founder and CEO of Glimpse, told TechCrunch. To help companies find more defects, Glimpse has developed a way for battery manufacturers to inspect cells 10 to 30 times faster by significantly boosting throughput on their existing CT scanners. Using Glimpse’s software, manufacturers could scan tens of thousands of cells per day, up from the current handful, Moch said.
A customer “super scanner” that Glimpse is developing with partners could complete a scan in a second or two, he added. Batteries aren’t the only parts to suffer from costly defects, of course, so Glimpse is launching a new product, the company exclusively told TechCrunch. Called Explore, the product will let customers in industries such as aerospace, automotive, electronics and medical devices use the startup’s image processing software to speed up quality control checks using CT scanners in their labs and development environments.
Glimpse currently has over 100 customers such as Anker, Lucid and the U.S. Navy, and currently generates revenue in the “mid seven-figure” range, Moch said. Customers include both buyers and sellers of batteries.
To wring more speed out of traditionally slow CT scanners, the startup has written its own image processing pipeline, which compresses scans and cleans them up. It’s built around deep learning algorithms, and much of the initial processing happens on edge computers deployed at a customer’s site. Altogether, the combination of quality improvements and compression make for clear images that load within seconds in a web browser, the company claims.
Alongside scanned images, Glimpse’s dashboard will also show customers part measurements they specify. In the case of batteries, it might measure the distance between layers in a battery cell. If they start deviating from the norm, Glimpse’s software will flag it and highlight it in the scanned images.
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