Eatron Technologies, a battery software firm based at the Warwick Innovation Centre, has secured a share of £9 million in Government funding to develop a new battery management system for electric bikes, scooters, drones and off-highway equipment. The award comes through the DRIVE35 Demonstrate competition, one of ten projects backed under the scheme, and will fund a 12-month development effort known as ZENBMS.
What the Project Actually Involves
The core of the work is a 48-volt battery management system, or BMS - the electronics and software that monitor a battery's charge, temperature and health in real time. Get this wrong and batteries degrade faster, or worse, become a safety hazard. Get it right and a battery pack lasts longer, charges more efficiently, and fails more predictably rather than catastrophically. Eatron is not working alone here. Infineon, a semiconductor manufacturer, is supplying the chipset that will run the system, while WMG at the University of Warwick is leading the safety analysis - a natural extension of a partnership between Eatron and WMG that goes back to 2018.
That distinction matters. A chipset is hardware; the BMS logic sitting on top of it is software and algorithms. Eatron's pitch, in effect, is that smarter software can squeeze more safe performance out of the same battery cells, without needing a redesign of the cells themselves.
Why Smaller Batteries Are the Harder Problem
Battery management for electric cars has had years of investment and regulatory attention. The 48-volt category - e-bikes, e-scooters, robots, drones - has not had the same level of engineering scrutiny, despite these devices being everywhere on city streets and in warehouses now. Smaller batteries often run on thinner margins for error: less room for thermal management hardware, tighter cost constraints, and in many cases, less rigorous oversight of how they're manufactured or maintained. A battery management system built specifically for this category, rather than scaled down from automotive-grade systems, addresses a gap that has become more visible as e-bikes and e-scooters have moved from novelty to daily transport.
A Company Scaling Beyond the UK
The funding lands at a moment when Eatron is expanding internationally. The company opened an office in Tokyo in 2025 and has since picked up contracts with Japanese automotive and energy manufacturers, while also looking at the US market. Its AI software, notably, doesn't rely on large data centres - it can run on board a battery's own management system or in the cloud, and because the models are pre-trained, the company says it can continue managing battery performance even if a customer switches component suppliers. That's a meaningful claim in an industry where supply chains shift often and vendor lock-in is a real cost concern for manufacturers.
Chief executive Dr Umut Genc has tied the broader strategy to energy economics: persistently high oil prices, he argues, are pushing more industries toward battery-powered alternatives, whether in vehicles or in grid-support storage. Eatron's software is already used in large-scale batteries that help balance electricity demand, which suggests the company sees its underlying technology as applicable well beyond transport.
What This Means for the Sector
DRIVE35, run through the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK, is explicitly aimed at pushing technology out of the lab and into commercial deployment. Ian Constance, the Centre's chief executive, framed the funding as building the evidence base needed for manufacturers to adopt new systems at scale - a reminder that government co-funding at this stage is less about invention and more about de-risking the jump from prototype to production line. For the wider e-mobility sector, a safer, longer-lasting 48-volt battery system has practical implications: fewer failures, more predictable maintenance costs, and potentially stronger safety assurances for a category of vehicle that has drawn scrutiny over battery fires in recent years. Whether Eatron's system becomes an industry standard or one option among several will depend on how the 12-month project performs once it leaves the test bench.
