Albert Invent hopes to revolutionize the chemicals sector with its artificial intelligence platform
If startup funding rounds are any measure, generative AI is seeing widespread adoption in science. It makes sense: there’s a lot of trial and error in R&D, and any tool that can speed up the process for researchers is bound to be useful.
The latest is Albert’s inventionwhich offers an AI platform trained on data from previous chemical experiments, allowing chemists to interrogate data at the molecular level when they formulate chemicals. Its founders previously ran a 3D printing company, and decided to use that materials science knowledge to train artificial intelligence in chemical processes. The startup has now secured a $22.5 million Series A funding round led by Coatue.
The company’s platform, called Albert Breakthrough, combines structured data with the company’s AI models. The hope is that chemical companies can use the platform to develop new products faster and better. The company says the platform can, for example, generate predictive chemicals toxicology in real-time and “outperform” standard industry models.
Albert Invent’s clients include Chemours, Solenis, Keystone Industries, Applied Molecules, Henkel and Nouryon.
Nick Telken, CEO and co-founder of Albert Invent, believes the platform will bring to chemical science what data scientists have been unable to achieve for some time. “This is a SaaS product that the world’s largest chemical companies are using to fundamentally reinvent the physical world. The biggest problem we face as a society, from sustainability to personal medical devices, all of these problems will be solved through chemistry,” he said.
Talken says they built their base models trained on more than 15 million chemical structures. “In this industry, you don’t want to just take an online dataset. You need to have domain-specific knowledge. And so we’ve taken almost the entire public information space about chemistry, about 15 million molecules, and built a foundational model, and this is what supports Albert hack.
When asked if the company uses foundational models like OpenAI, he said the company sometimes uses them for some of its agent networks, such as chatbots, but its underlying chemistry models are its own.
Its co-founder, Ken Kesner, previously led Molecule Corp., which he started in a chemistry lab built inside a trailer in his backyard. The two built Molecule Corp into a global producer of 3D materials for stereolithography, selling it in May 2019 to Henkel Corporation.
While at Henkel, they built a team to work on the problem they are now tackling. “We incubated Albert Invent as a software startup within this 145-year-old multinational chemical company and then spun it off into a separate entity,” Telken said.
Prior to this Series A round, the startup had raised a small seed round led by Index Ventures in late 2022. TCV, Index Ventures, F-Prime, and Homebrew also participated in the Series A.
“It is exciting to support Albert as the company seeks to transform how chemistry research is conducted by applying cutting-edge AI technologies to achieve greater efficiencies and overall business benefit,” David Schneider, general partner at Kuato, said in a statement.
Commenting on this, Johan Landfors, CTO of Nouryon, said in a statement that the platform is now an integral part of their product development.
