Could AI Driven Materials Discovery Be The Next Big Investment Boom?

The concept of discovering new materials in laboratories for industrial and commercial usage is not new. However, the current geopolitical climate, protectionism and anxieties over security of supply of rare earths has heightened that need for synthetic materials with artificial intelligence and automation emerging as key enablers.

While Google’s parent company Alphabet’s DeepMind subsidiary often brings AI driven materials discovery projects into mainstream public conscience, much of the quiet but significant revolution in the sphere is being led by a cohort of startups in Europe and North America.

This need not come as a surprise. Both continents face a potential five-fold increase in demand for rare earths and minerals in the run up to the end of this decade, according to forecasts. It will be largely driven by the growth of digital devices, electric vehicle batteries, solar panels and wind turbines.

Among the European cohort is Paris, France-based Altrove, whose CEO and cofounder Thibaud Martin believes AI driven materials discovery to be the inexorable direction of travel for the world’s industrial complex facing operating pressures and a pressing need to decarbonize.

Inexorable Direction Of Travel

The fine line between success and failure for those in the segment bottles down to getting the right mix of proprietary AI, automated lab synthesis and self-learning characterization.

“Materials have been discovered in labs around the world – whether by accident or design – for over a century. But it often took nearly 20 years for those materials to go from the lab to the market. With AI as an enabler, we can get there in less than 18 months,” Martin said in an interview.

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Interest in the sphere is growing exponentially on both sides of the Atlantic. Altrove raised $10 million in a recent seed funding round, with participation from Bpifrance Digital Venture, Contrarian Ventures and Emblem. That took the French startup’s total funding to $14 million.

Altrove appears to be toughing it out in an increasingly crowded but rapidly growing field. Some of its competitors such as MatNex, Orbital Materials, Atinary Technologies, CuspAI, Radical AI, Citrine Informatics, Phasetree and Noble AI are all either ahead or at similar stages of their upscaling journey. Not to mention, the deep pockets of the likes of DeepMind.

But Martin noted: “There is ample room in the critical ecosystem of AI driven materials discovery for us and our peers. While I suspect that we all keep our cards close to our chest, we also opensource.

“However, clear differentiators and efficiencies matter. What sets Altrove apart from competitors, such as DeepMind, is that we do not just discover what materials could exist to solve the customer’s specific use case, but also synthesise and produce the material by finding the correct ‘recipe’ to do this.

“So, what we are offering is not the ‘only’ way to make a new material or powdered synthetic metal but the most optimal way to get there and take it to the next level. The process underpinning it is oftentimes as valuable as the recipe itself.”

Martin said both aspects come into play in terms of shrinking the time to arrive at new materials, whether experimental or computational.

“In specific industrial material use cases, this could see our partners and customers hypothetically move from scarcity to abundance in a matter of years whilst achieving cost savings and lower carbon emissions.”

AI Driven Materials Discovery Market Set To Grow

Altrove has secured over a dozen partnerships with companies across automotive, energy, and heavy industrial segments to deploy AI-designed materials at scale.

While Martin declined to reveal the names at this stage, he highlighted a few first-of-a-kind technical milestones – including rare-earth-free, cobalt-free magnetic materials for high-performance motors and non-toxic, lead-free compounds for sensors and actuators.

“For our end-customers and partners, we are bringing transparency on deliverables to the table. We will likely see the first products live within a matter of a couple of years.”

Martin insisted the plan for Altrove has always been the same when the startup put forward its initial models in November 2023.

“We are going down the viable material substitutions route to target markets that already exist at present and are growing, but perhaps remain over-reliant on one incumbent material that is problematic for one of two reasons – either its supply is risky or it has a lot of regulatory complications.”

And the Altrove boss sees both his company as well as his industry growing at a reasonable pace, because the world needs entire new classes of materials – designed, validated and scaled using AI – that “deliver ecological, cost-efficient and resilient supply chains.”

“Strengthening our industrial sovereignty is no longer optional. It is the key to protecting climate goals, competitiveness and national security,” Martin concluded.

While the jury may still be out on this one at the moment, a potential multi-billion dollar AI driven materials discovery industry may well be in the works on both sides of the Atlantic in the not too distant future.