Altrove harnesses AI and automation to innovate new material creation

French Startup Altrove Pioneers Innovation in New Materials Development

In recent years, innovation in new materials development has been gaining momentum, and French startup Altrove is positioning itself as a key player in this rapidly advancing field. The deep tech company has already secured €3.7 million (approximately $4 million) in funding. The field of materials prediction has seen numerous teams, including those at DeepMind, Microsoft, and Meta, making significant strides.

Historically, research and development in finding new materials have progressed slowly. Over the past 50 years, multiple bottlenecks have impeded progress, particularly at the initial stage of predicting material existence. The complexity of combining different chemical elements exponentially increases with each additional element, resulting in millions of potential combinations. Advances in artificial intelligence models have started to overcome these calculation constraints, leading to a surge in the prediction of more stable materials.

Beyond Prediction: The Challenge of Creating New Materials

However, predicting new materials is only a part of the equation. The next challenge lies in developing the precise "recipe" to create these materials, considering variables such as proportions, temperature, order of combination, and duration. Altrove is concentrating on inorganic materials, focusing initially on rare earth elements, which present a market opportunity due to their scarcity, variable pricing, and reliance on China for supply.

Automating the Iteration Loop

Altrove doesn't invent new materials from scratch but selects promising candidates from the pool of predicted materials. The startup utilizes its proprietary AI models to generate potential recipes and tests each one, producing tiny samples. They have developed a unique characterization technology using an X-ray diffractometer to evaluate the performance of these materials. This step is crucial, as it often reveals that the produced material isn't exactly what was anticipated. Altrove's expertise in characterization, led by co-founder and CTO Joonathan Laulainen, plays a critical role in this process.

Automated Labs for Faster Results

To accelerate the development of new materials, Altrove aims to automate its lab, allowing for the parallel testing of multiple recipes. This high throughput methodology is essential because pure prediction accounts for only 30% of the journey to industrial application. The remaining 70% involves real-life iteration. An automated lab increases the throughput, speeding up the feedback loop and enhancing the efficiency of the research process.

Altrove is defining itself as a hardware-enabled AI company and envisions selling licenses for its newly developed materials or partnering with third parties to produce them. The company's recent funding round was led by prominent investors and included contributions from business angels in the tech and biotech fields. Drawing inspiration from biotech companies that leverage AI for drug discovery, Altrove is applying similar principles to materials science.

Looking ahead, Altrove plans to establish its automated lab by the end of the year and aims to commercialize its first material asset within 18 months, potentially revolutionizing the field of new materials development.