Rob Timms
| Rob Timms | |
| Occupation | Software entrepreneur, co-founder of Ionworks |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founding Ionworks, co-creating PyBaMM |
Rob Timms is a British entrepreneur and one of three co-founders of Ionworks, a battery simulation software company that participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. Ionworks develops cloud-based simulation tools used by battery and automotive companies to accelerate research and development cycles by replacing physical experiments with computational models.[1]
Career
Timms holds a PhD and has a research background in battery simulation, having worked alongside co-founders Valentin Sulzer and Tom Tranter in academia. The three founders collectively have approximately 20 years of experience in physics-based battery simulations. Timms's doctoral work was in mathematics or a closely related discipline; the founding team's PhDs were earned at the University of Oxford, the University of Leeds, and the University of East Anglia.[1]
While in academia, Timms and his co-founders created PyBaMM (Python Battery Mathematical Modelling), an open-source battery modelling software package. Originally developed to address concerns about scientific reproducibility, PyBaMM grew to become one of the most widely used open-source battery simulation tools in the field, adopted by battery engineering teams across industry and academia. Ionworks is built on top of PyBaMM and extends it into a commercial platform.[2]
Ionworks describes its product as a "Simulation OS for battery companies." The platform allows battery engineers to create models from their own experimental data and run large-scale simulations in the cloud to explore the full design space of battery cells and systems. The company positions itself as addressing a significant cost problem: battery companies typically spend tens of millions of dollars annually on physical experiments, and simulations that could replace many of these experiments have historically been underutilized because they are difficult to create and run. Ionworks aims to make such simulations accessible to every engineer, not just simulation specialists.
The company, which is based in the United Kingdom, was accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch. Its clients include leading battery and automotive companies. A testimonial from Dr. Ali Firouzi, CTO of Sonocharge, describes Ionworks as having helped his company "quickly identify the best course of action, delivering a tailored model" of their system.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Ionworks – Y Combinator". 'Y Combinator}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Ionworks". 'Ionworks}'. Retrieved 2026-03-18.