I’m thrilled to announce Glimpse’s public launch. To show our vision and our progress towards this vision so far, we’re launching a public demo of the Glimpse portal with scans of 1000 commercial off-the-shelf cells. Anyone can download and play with this data here (brief dataset paper here); I’m excited to see what the community comes up with. We’ve also authored a perspective paper on the challenge of battery quality at scale, which is precisely what Glimpse has set out to address.

In many ways, Glimpse is a dream come true for me and the summation of what I’ve spent my career working towards. I briefly toyed with starting a company based on the cycle life prediction work from my PhD, but I didn’t feel confident in my understanding of this problem in the real world and I was excited to work for Tesla. I’m so glad I joined — Tesla was a transformative experience for me on many levels. In my opinion, one of the best parts of Tesla is that you don’t have to guess what the problems are: there are too many to pick from (in a good way!). Without getting into details, it became apparent that (a) battery quality was a major problem and (b) CT could help. I honestly can’t imagine a better problem for my interests: Glimpse works at the intersection of a massive global problem close to my heart and deep technical challenges in X-ray imaging, computer vision, data analysis and visualization, and battery science.

Perhaps the most novel aspect of my startup journey so far has been the intensity of the cofounder relationships. So I’d like to spend some time reflecting on Eric and Patrick.

I met Eric while working on perhaps Tesla’s toughest battery failure mode, for which I was the engineering lead and Eric was the program manager. This problem was high-visibility and demanded a high degree of information synthesis and coordination among innumerable teams, which Eric handled exceptionally well. I had been noodling over this idea for a while and had convinced myself that it could be big, but that’s where it remained—an idea in my head. One hot August day, Eric and I got lunch together, and I randomly shared what I’d been daydreaming about. Eric immediately saw the potential, put the pieces together as to what needed to happen, and challenged me to clarify my own understanding of the technical vision. We started pitching three months later, and we left Tesla and our remaining stock options soon after that. I would probably still be at Tesla today (an amazing place to work to be fair), slowly turning the idea over in my head, were it not for Eric’s drive and urgency to make this idea a reality. At Glimpse, Eric handles sales, operations, fundraising, finance, partner relationships, legal, and so much more. In short, Eric is an executor. I feel lucky to have a cofounder who I’m confident can grow a successful business from this technology, so that I can spend time on what I love doing most: understanding the boundaries of what’s possible, working through tough technical challenges, and building.

Patrick might be Glimpse’s secret weapon. I’m confident there are very few, if any, folks on the planet with Patrick’s combination of battery expertise and software engineering skills. Patrick and I started working together when I was in grad school and he was at Toyota Research Institute. Patrick wrangled the data out from whatever asisine format the cycler used so that we could continuously monitor our cycling tests; I’m not sure if our machine learning work would have seen the light of day without his persistence and skill. At Glimpse, Patrick does it all and has touched every part of our codebase, from the deep linear algebra to the front end, while simultaneously moving quickly and maintaining high code quality. It’s been a true pleasure working with him again; I’ve learned a ton from him on software development and much more.

Our founding engineering team of Owen, Amariah, Bailey, and Jim all bring unique skills and perspectives to the table, and Glimpse would not be where it is today without each of them. I hope we can all work together for a long time.

Last but not least, we’ve set up shop in Boston; while I certainly miss the California sunshine, my wife and I have enjoyed being walking distance from family. Greentown Labs has been an incredible launching pad for us; highly recommend.

We have big plans for Glimpse and we’re just getting started. If you’re interested, check out https://glimp.se and perhaps consider joining us.