Financing advances for two AI-based companies

Albert, a California-based company that claims to have built “the first chemistry-native AI operating system for R&D”, has announced a $55 million Series B financing round. Delta-v Capital, Socium Ventures, HighSage Ventures, Coral Capital and Legion VC are taking part, alongside existing investors Coatue, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Index Ventures and Applied Ventures.

The new funding will be used to expand Albert’s AI capabilities, shortening development cycles and reducing time to market for consumer products. These were developed with partners including AkzoNobel, Avient, BASF, Chemours, Clorox, Henkel, Kenvue and Nouryon, using their scientific ontology, intelligence, integrations and regulatory compliance expertise. 

In the past year, Albert has seen 26-fold growth in use in project creation, with six times more scientists on Albert OS and four times more workflow creation as more teams bring different R&D processes onto the platform. According to Albert, its Valence platform is 45 times more accurate than general-purpose AI at finding the correct answers to scientific questions.

“Enterprise AI for chemistry has to be built from the ontology up; the language, data, workflows, and decisions for R&D are deeply specialized. Because our team comes from the chemical industry, we’ve built Albert around that reality, pairing a scientific ontology with chemistry-native AI in a way that is tailored for each customer,” said Nick Talken, CEO and co-founder of Albert.

Meanwhile, Scimplify, a manufacturer of advanced materials and speciality chemicals based in India, has announced a $25 million strategic funding round led by Hitachi Ventures, taking its total equity capital raised to $80 million. Teknor Apex, which will be its US manufacturing partner, and Henkel both joined as new investors, with Accel, 3one4 Capital, Bertelsmann India and Omnivore all returning.

The company said that it plans to deploy the round to expand research, processing and manufacturing capacity for critical materials used across semiconductors, defence, energy and AI infrastructure in the US, so that the discoveries from R&D work in these fields can be turned into commercial products there too. 

It claims to have built “an integrated system connecting every step between materials discovery and commercial delivery”. Scimplify’s platform has been used in over 40 countries in the past three years and over 40% of its portfolio is already in advanced materials for semiconductors, batteries and critical minerals.

“Today's supply chains were built for a different era. They're concentrated, fragile and slow to adapt, and they're breaking under the demands of AI, energy and advanced materials,” commented Sachin Santhosh, co-founder at Scimplify. 

In Scimplify’s system, AI and computational tools are used to identify promising materials and production routes based on customer requirements. Scimplify’s scientists then develop, test and refine these routes in its own laboratories and engineers scale validated processes before transferring them into qualified manufacturing facilities. 

The end result, it is claimed, is “a high-purity, stable, commercially viable product … at repeatable, industrial-scale volumes”, whatever market it goes into. Experimental results and data captured through IoT pilots at the facilities feed back into the system, continuously improving the material and its production process.