He spent a summer painting wave equations on a guest-room wall. Now his instruments listen to what's happening inside a battery - and hear the defects no one else can.
Most battery makers cannot see inside the thing they sell. A finished cell is a sealed metal can. What's happening at the electrode - the buckling, the gassing, the silent flaw that becomes tomorrow's fire - stays hidden until it isn't. Shawn Murphy decided that was unacceptable, and that the fix was sound.
His company, Titan Advanced Energy Solutions, sends ultrasound through a battery and reads what bounces back. The waves map the cell's internal morphology - density, structure, the state of health and the state of charge - in real time, without cutting anything open. Titan calls the production system IonSight. Murphy calls the underlying claim plainly: about 100 times better resolution than the industry's standard tools.
That matters most on the factory floor, where the economics are brutal. Murphy is fond of a number that makes plant managers wince: when a new battery line ramps up, first-year throughput yields can sit at 10 to 20 percent. Four out of five cells, scrap. Catch the bad ones early - before more value is poured into a doomed cell - and the math of an entire gigafactory changes. In 2024, Titan put that promise to work in a deployment with cell manufacturer Navitas Systems.
It is a strange place to land for a man trained to read the sky.
Conventional management systems carry an ~8% error margin, so makers wall off a 20% buffer. Murphy's pitch: measure precisely, reclaim the buffer, and roughly double cycle life.
Everything is about a life choice. Who do you vote for? What car do you buy?Shawn Murphy / My Climate Journey
Murphy studied two things at UMass Amherst that rarely share a transcript: astrophysics and the classics. He later took an MBA from MIT. The pairing is a clue. He reads instrument data and he reads Latin, and he treats both as the same act - going back to first principles instead of accepting what everyone already believes.
He traces the spark to age 12, and a four-hour tour of a nuclear facility that, instead of frightening him, did the opposite. It dissolved the fear and left physics in its place.
The career that followed refused to pick a lane. He founded an eBook company in the 1990s and held an early patent on digital rights management for internet subscription payments. He won the MIT 50K. He built a fabless semiconductor company designing anti-tamper hardware so small it could hide inside other chips. Then he spent eight years at Draper Laboratory, rising from program manager to Head of Earth and Space Science - deploying instruments and spacecraft for NASA on missions including LADEE and CYGNSS, with fingerprints on the Phoenix 2 Lander and an exoplanet-hunting nanosatellite.
When Royal Dutch Shell wanted an innovation engine, Murphy built it: Shell TechWorks, an 85-person shop where he was, by his own account, the only person from an oil-and-gas background. The traditional managers were, he says, "hated and loved at the same time" - because his team kept invalidating their assumptions with math, sometimes by an order of magnitude or two. He also led confidential design work on the blowout preventer after Deepwater Horizon.
A Draper VP looked at his resume - three startups, astrophysics - and balked at the gap. Murphy's answer: "You have to have a good brain, great attitude, and really perseverance to get things done." He got the job and ended up running the space-science group.
At a 2016 Tesla-hosted energy forum, co-founder Sean O'Day pitched him on battery storage. Murphy spent that summer in Croatia working out how ultrasound moves through a lithium-ion cell - painting the equations directly onto a guest-room wall until the answer held.
The aspiration is concrete: halve the cost of lithium-ion storage, double its working life, and erase the range anxiety that keeps drivers tethered to gas. Push the price of a battery below $100 per kilowatt-hour, pair it with cheap solar, and Murphy argues the dependency on hydrocarbons simply ends.
He thinks in systems, not slogans. Ask him about climate and he'll talk about heliophysics, ocean cycles and carbon cycles in the same breath - then land on the personal: what you vote for, what you drive. He likes the Chinese bamboo parable, where you water the ground for five years and see nothing, then watch it grow an inch a day. Deep tech, he means, is a patience business.
Should Titan exit well, he has spoken of starting a mission-first fund - a VC or B Corp backing hard climate problems from seed through Series A, the very gap where hardware founders so often starve.
You have to have a good brain, great attitude, and really perseverance to get things done.
We need to set up the future for future generations.
What we do here affects people across the world - and what they do affects us.
Astrophysics and classics in the same degree. He reads battery spectra and ancient texts with the same first-principles instinct.
"Titan" carries a whiff of his Draper years - moons, landers, instruments built to survive places humans can't go.
For a man who has raised tens of millions, the travel philosophy is modest. Discipline on the small things, ambition on the large.
He ran Shell's innovation lab as the lone person there without an oil-and-gas pedigree - and considered that an advantage.
His favorite uncomfortable statistic: how many good cells a brand-new battery line actually produces in year one.
The founding math of Titan didn't start on a slide. It started in paint, on a Croatian guest-room wall.
Built from public sources. Quotes and figures drawn from interviews, company materials and press.