Albert Invent hopes to revolutionize the chemical industry with its AI platform

If early funding rounds are a metric, generative AI is seeing enough scientific discovery. It makes sense: there’s a lot of trial and error involved in research and development, and any tool that can speed up the researchers’ process is bound to be useful.

The latest is Albert Invent, which offers an AI platform trained on data from past chemical experiments, allowing chemists to investigate molecular-level data when making chemicals. Its founders previously owned a 3D printing company, and decided to use that materials science knowledge to train AI on 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 will be able to use the platform to develop new products faster and better. The company says the platform, for example, can generate chemicals that predict toxicology in real-time and “beat” standard industry models.

Albert Invent’s clients include Chemours, Solenis, Keystone Industries, Applied Molecules, Henkel and Nouryon.

Nick Talken, CEO and founder of Albert Invent, thinks the platform will bring to chemistry what data scientists have been reaching for for a long time. “This is a SaaS product used by the world’s largest chemical companies to reinvent the virtual world. The biggest problem we face as a society, from sustainability to personal medical devices – all of those will be solved by chemistry,” he said.

Talken says they built their own basic models trained on more than 15 million chemical structures. “In this field, you don’t just want to take a lot of data from the internet. You need to take domain-specific information. So we took almost all of the public knowledge around chemistry, about 15 million molecules, built a basic model, and that’s what powers Albert Breakthrough. “

When asked if the company uses basic models like OpenAI, he said that sometimes the company uses them for other networks of its agents, such as chatbots, but its basic models are its chemistry.

Its founder, Ken Kisner, previously headed Molecule Corp, which he started in a chemical lab built inside a trailer in his backyard. The two built Molecule Corp to become a global manufacturer of 3D stereolithography materials, and sold it in May 2019 to Henkel Corporation.

And while at Henkel, they created a team to fix the problem they’re currently fixing. “We incorporated Albert Invent as a software startup within this 145-year-old chemical company, and spun it off into a separate company,” Talken said.

Prior to this Series A round, the startup had raised a small interest led by Index Ventures through late 2022. TCV, Index Ventures, F-Prime, and Homebrew also participated in the Series A round.

“We are excited to support Albert as the company seeks to revolutionize the way chemical research is done by using the latest AI technologies for greater efficiency and overall business benefit,” said David Schneider, general partner at Coatue, in a statement.

Commenting, Johan Landfors, CTO of Nouryon, in a statement said that this platform is important for the development of their product.