In this exclusive interview – Beyond Batteries has never spoken to any press before – BESTmag talks to Beyond Batteries’ founder, director and owner, Colin Fulker at the company’s rural HQ.
Falmer is an unusual place. This idyllic, rural village on the outskirts of the English coastal city of Brighton saw a population explosion in the 1960s when a new campus university, University of Sussex, was built next to the village. Falmer was then bisected in the 1990s, when the Brighton bypass section of the A27 highway was constructed, splitting the village in two. And, in 2011, this tiny village became home to a 30,000+ capacity football stadium for English football club Brighton and Hove Albion – officially known as the American Express Community Stadium (but commonly referred to as “The Amex” or “Falmer”).
So it should come as no surprise that strange little Falmer is home to Britain’s first sodium battery “factory”. The quotation marks are intentional – Beyond Batteries occupies three units in a small “industrial” estate in former agricultural buildings about a mile north of Falmer’s village centre. Its neighbours are a rifle range and grazing cattle.
When I meet Colin, I said how refreshing it was to find an industrial unit in such a bucolic setting, and not a traditional concrete-and-metal industrial estate. He sighed: “We’re growing to the point where we’re going to have to move to a proper industrial estate some time very soon.”
Colin studied mechanical engineering at university and went on to work in construction. During the first lockdown of 2020 he became obsessed with a YouTube channel called Fully Charged (now known as Everything Electric). “Basically, during lockdown, I went back to episode one, watched them all, and then when I got to about episode 120, the overriding theme of the show was: ‘you can have all the renewables in the world, but if you can’t store it, it’s useless.’ And I thought, ‘well, there you go.’”
Like so many people, Colin found lockdown was a time that allowed for reflection on new directions for his life. Unlike most people, however, Colin followed up on it. He knew that batteries were the future but wasn’t sure, at that time, which chemistry he’d opt for: “We heard all the nasty stuff about lithium. Back then [stories about] fires and were quite prevalent …obviously, the oil industry was fuelling a bit of that fire … literally and metaphorically.”
He decided to start small and find a niche. As a keen skier, his thoughts turned to camper vans. Lighter means better efficiency. Colin realised that by replacing the lead-acid battery with a lithium-ion-phosphate battery it would provide the same energy density but at a lower weight.
“Camper vans were a perfect fit because that’s where you want something smaller, lighter and safer to replace lead-acid batteries,” Fulker said.
However, the company soon identified a larger opportunity in commercial applications that still rely heavily on diesel generators, particularly in the construction and environmental monitoring sectors.
“We started focusing on areas where generators were still being used and people thought batteries were impossible,” Fulker said. “For things like CCTV on building sites, generators used to power them. Now a compact battery can do the same job.”
Beyond Batteries specialises in battery pack assembly rather than cell manufacturing. The company develops the physical battery design, electronics and integration in-house while sourcing cells (typically 32140 cells) from global suppliers.
“Pack assembly is ultimately what our business is – not electrochemistry,” Fulker said. “We prototype everything in-house, but the cells themselves mainly come from China because nowhere else can match the price and quality right now.”
The battery management systems (BMS) come from different sources, including China’s Jiabida, but the company plans to develop its own BMS.
More recently, the company has begun working with sodium-ion batteries and claims to be the first UK company to commercially offer a sodium-ion battery system.
“We were the first company in the UK to make a sodium-ion battery commercially available,” Fulker said
Sodium batteries offer advantages in safety, resource availability and sustainability compared with lithium-based chemistries, although they have lower energy density.
“Sodium is everywhere and geopolitically stable – pretty much every country has access to it,” Fulker said. “You get incredible performance and safety, but the trade-off is lower energy density compared with lithium.”
The company says its approach prioritises safety over maximum energy density, focusing on applications where reliability and durability are more important than compact size.
“We only play with chemistries that we consider safe – something I’d be happy to sleep above if it was under my bed,” Fulker said.
Beyond Batteries currently offers around 25 off-the-shelf products alongside bespoke systems developed for commercial customers across sectors including construction, security and environmental monitoring. All its products are Bluetooth-enabled, allowing users to turn them on and off, and read the discharge stats, remotely using their smartphones.
Beyond Batteries’ latest product
The company is also working on new products aimed at replacing lead-acid batteries used in fire alarm backup systems in commercial buildings, which are typically replaced every three-to-five years. Colin says Beyond Batteries’ cells will last for 10 years: “We’re going to build them first and get all the certifications done, and then hopefully the market will catch on to their levels of safety and longevity.”
Disclosure
For the purposes of maintaining journalistic integrity, I must disclose that I know a contractor who has previously worked for Beyond Batteries, and it is through this contractor that I found out about the company. But I had not had any interaction with the company before conducting this interview.
A longer version of this interview will appear in the Spring 2026 edition of BESTmag.
