Ionworks

Ionworks is a Pittsburgh-based battery simulation software company founded in 2023 by the creators and core maintainers of PyBaMM - the most widely-used open-source battery modeling library in academia and industry. Their flagship product, Ionworks Studio, is a cloud-based "Simulation OS" that gives battery R&D teams a structured, end-to-end platform to ingest cycler test data, fit physics-based electrochemical models (Doyle-Fuller-Newman, SPMe, SPM), and run protocol-driven simulations at a fraction of the time and cost of physical experiments. By replacing weeks of cycler channel time with minutes of simulation, Ionworks helps battery engineers explore design spaces - varying electrode thickness, porosity, loading, and charging strategies - without building additional cells.

The platform is built around four workflow stages: Measure (normalizing and centralizing cycler data from all major hardware brands including Maccor, Neware, Arbin, BioLogic, and Novonix), Train (parameterizing validated physics-based models from experimental data), Predict (simulating battery protocols before physical testing to assess lithium plating risk, fast-charge strategies, and internal states), and Optimize (sweeping design variables against engineering targets). Ionworks Studio is also fully accessible via a Python SDK and REST API, making it compatible with AI agents and automated optimization pipelines. The company positions itself at the intersection of physics and AI, arguing that electrochemical conservation laws provide constraints too powerful for purely data-driven ML approaches - and that physics-based simulation is the right foundation for the next generation of battery AI.

Ionworks is highly significant to the US energy supply chain because battery R&D speed and cost directly constrain the pace of EV adoption, grid-scale energy storage deployment, and domestic battery manufacturing competitiveness. By dramatically compressing the build-test-iterate cycle - turning weeks of physical testing into minutes of simulation - Ionworks enables battery companies, automotive OEMs, drone and advanced air mobility firms, and materials developers to move faster and de-risk designs before committing to expensive physical validation. Trusted by customers including Iontra, Sonocharge, and Avrion Battery Labs, and advised by luminaries such as Venkat Viswanathan (University of Michigan) and Mark Verbrugge (GM R&D, National Academy of Engineering), Ionworks represents a critical software infrastructure layer for accelerating the US battery innovation ecosystem.