The Story of Accure: Building the Future of Battery Intelligence
Sometimes the most promising startups emerge not from a sudden flash of inspiration, but from years of witnessing an industry’s growing pains firsthand. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Accure founder Kai-Philipp Kairies shared how fifteen years of battery research led to building a company that’s reshaping how the world manages energy storage.
From Research Lab to Market Reality
Before founding Accure, Kai led one of the world’s largest research groups on grid-connected battery systems. “I’ve been doing batteries for about 15 years now,” he explains. “And before starting Accure, I was leading one of the largest research groups on grid connected battery systems in the world and just saw firsthand the challenges of the industry.”
The exponential growth of battery deployment was creating massive operational challenges that existing tools couldn’t handle. As Kai notes: “The battery space is growing exponentially. And at the time, there weren’t really good tools around to manage this growth.”
Launching During Lockdown
While June 2020 might have seemed like an awkward time to start a company, for Accure’s founding team, the pandemic created an unexpected advantage. “Actually, yes. It gave us something to do during the lockdown,” Kai recalls. “The entire team was hyper committed because there just wasn’t anything else to do.”
The focus paid off quickly. Accure secured a two-year contract with a leading German storage company before they even had a product. “We were quite open about the timelines that it would take a few months. But you can imagine just starting a company where, like, five people, we’ve got this massive contract, and now we’ve got a deadline that we’re running against.”
Building the Core Product
Accure’s platform tackles a critical challenge in the battery industry: safety and performance optimization. “What we do is we analyze data that is produced by batteries during their operation. Voltage, current, temperature,” Kai explains. “We have some quite sophisticated physics based and machine learning models in the cloud that can ingest that data and then tell owners and operators of these systems if a battery is safe or if it will blow up in a week or two.”
Growing Through Market Education
Rather than pushing for immediate market dominance, Accure took a patient approach, focusing on educating the market about battery analytics. This strategy proved prescient as the industry matured and companies began experiencing the pain points Accure was built to solve.
“Three or four years ago they didn’t [know about battery analytics],” Kai notes. “Now, as these batteries become a vital part of their business, all of a sudden performance safety lifetime really matters… they’re much more open to solutions.”
The Vision Ahead
Looking to the future, Accure has ambitious plans to expand its impact on the global energy transition. “I’m a strong believer that batteries are an essential part of our mobility and energy future,” Kai states. “In order to have a fully renewable energy society, we need functioning batteries.”
The company’s ultimate vision extends far beyond their current market: “Ultimately, I believe we have the potential and the ambition to improve every battery on this planet, whether it’s in a motorcycle, in an electric car, in a ship, or in a stationary storage system.”
They plan to achieve this through a methodical, vertical-by-vertical approach: “We’re going to get there vertical by becoming the number one solution, the no brainer that everyone wants to work with. And then we’re going to copy and paste that to the other fields until we’re can improve every battery on this planet.”
For Accure, the exponential growth of battery deployment isn’t just a market opportunity – it’s a chance to play a crucial role in enabling the transition to renewable energy. By focusing on making batteries safer and more efficient, they’re helping build the infrastructure needed for a sustainable future.