In recent years, the pace of innovation in materials development has been rapidly increasing. A new French startup named Altrove is poised to contribute to this ongoing wave of innovation, having already secured €3.7 million (approximately $4 million USD) in funding.
For enthusiasts of materials development, it’s hard to miss the significant breakthroughs that various teams have been sharing with the scientific community in the realm of materials prediction.
Altrove co-founder and CEO Thibaud Martin highlighted the historically slow progress in research and development for new materials over the past half-century. One major bottleneck in the process has been the challenge of predicting the existence of materials composed of a limited number of elements.
The use of artificial intelligence models by teams at companies like DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, and Orbital Materials has revolutionized the ability to predict stable materials that could potentially be developed. This has led to a surge in the prediction of stable materials in recent months, far surpassing the progress made in the previous five decades.
However, predicting the existence of new materials is just the first step in the process. The real challenge lies in devising the recipe for creating these materials.
Altrove is initially focusing on inorganic materials, specifically rare earth elements. The company is targeting a market opportunity in rare earth elements due to their scarcity, fluctuating prices, and heavy reliance on Chinese sources. Many companies are seeking to diversify their supply chains to reduce dependence on China and mitigate regulatory uncertainties.
Implementing an Automated Iteration Loop
Rather than inventing materials from scratch, Altrove identifies promising candidates from the pool of predicted materials and utilizes AI models to formulate potential recipes for these materials.
Altrove currently tests these recipes individually and produces small samples of each material. The company has developed a proprietary characterization technology utilizing an X-ray diffractometer to analyze the performance of the materials produced.
Altrove’s co-founder and CTO Joonathan Laulainen, a materials science PhD holder, brings expertise in material characterization to the company. Altrove possesses intellectual property related to material characterization.
Iterating and learning from the characterization process is vital for refining recipes and creating new materials. Automation of the laboratory is a key priority for Altrove to accelerate testing and feedback processes.
Altrove describes itself as a hardware-enabled AI company, aiming to license its newly developed materials or collaborate with third-party partners for production. The company recently raised €3.7 million in funding, led by Contrarian Ventures with Emblem as a participant. Notable business angels including Thomas Clozel (Owkin CEO), Julien Chaumond (Hugging Face CTO), and Nikolaj Deichmann (3Shape founder) also invested in Altrove.
Drawing inspiration from biotech firms using AI for drug discovery, Altrove intends to leverage AI for materials discovery. The company plans to establish its automated lab by the end of the year and introduce its first product within 18 months.
