Alexandre Collet, Founder and CEO of Freemens SAS has now officially joined ION as Co-Founder & VP of Engineering to strengthen the founding team of ION Energy. After earning a Master’s degree from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble, he spent 2 years with his PhD research professor making inventions in power electronics architecture, Lithium-Ion cell aging factors and state identification. Their innovations and breakthroughs in life-extension of Lithium-ion batteries led to the founding of Freemens in 2011.

Our acquisition of Freemens is reflective of ION’s growth and vision. In an increasingly crowded market, Freemens’ unparalleled Battery Management know-how has helped ION leap forward in sync with our mission to build reliable, high performance & no-compromise energy storage systems. I’m incredibly excited to welcome Alex and Freemens onboard our journey.

—Akhil Aryan, Co-Founder & CEO @ ION Energy

Among the products Freemens currently offers are the FreeSafe Extended (FS-XT) battery management system, the FreeSafe LT battery management system, Fusion firmware and Freeway cloud fleet management. Freemens products are chemistry-agnostic.

• FS-XT provides a high standard of security, optimal battery life-span, precise SOC (state of charge) and SOH (state of health) estimations and external data management (telemetry and onboard memory card). FreeSafe Extended has three main features: battery cells management, power line management and advanced communications functionalities.

• FreeSafe-LT is a battery management system providing a high feature density in a small form factor. This BMS is designed for applications that needs to be very cost effective but don’t want to cut on hig- end features such as wireless dashboard and Fleet Management. This product can be use standalone or in a Master Slave architecture.

• Fusion firmware is the brain of the BMS, incorporating SOC, SOH and SOP algorithms (temperature, measurement errors, equivalent cycles, impedance taken into account).

• FreeWay is a Fleet Management System (FMS) enabling the tracking, monitoring and management of any battery-powered application deployed using a Freemens BMS as the main sensor.

Apart from deploying their own systems and infrastructure, ION will license a chemistry-agnostic and cascadable architecture that enables rapid product development. Investors include OMC Power, Sattva Capital, and executives from Dentsu Aegis, Salesforce, Times Internet and Credit Suisse. The company is planning a formal Series A later this year.