Over the past few years, innovation in the development of new materials has accelerated. And a new French startup called Otherwise plans to play a role in this innovation cycle. The deep tech startup has already raised €3.7 million (around $4 million at current exchange rates).
If you are interested in developing new materials, you may have noticed that several teams have shared important breakthroughs with the research community in the field of materials prediction.
“Historically, over the last 50 years, R&D to find new materials has been very slow,” Altrove co-founder and CEO Thibaud Martin told JS. There have been a number of bottlenecks. And a major bottleneck has been the starting point: How can you predict whether materials made of a handful of elements can theoretically exist?
If you put two different chemical elements together, there are tens of thousands of possibilities. If you want to work with three different elements, there are tens of thousands of combinations. With four elements, you get millions of possibilities.
Teams working for DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta or Orbital Materials have developed artificial intelligence models to overcome computational limitations and predict new materials that might exist in a stable state. “More stable materials have been predicted in the last nine months than in the previous 49 years,” Martin said.
But solving this bottleneck is only part of the equation. Knowing that new materials can exist isn’t enough when it comes to making new materials. You have to figure out the recipe.
“A recipe isn't just about what you put together. It's also about the proportions, at what temperature, in what order, for how long. So there are a lot of factors, a lot of variables involved in how you make new materials,” Martin said.
Altrove focuses on inorganic materials and starts with rare earths. There is a market opportunity here with rare earths because they are difficult to obtain, prices vary widely and they often come from China. Many companies are trying to reduce their reliance on China as part of their supply chain to avoid regulatory uncertainties.
Creating an automated iteration loop
The company does not invent new materials from scratch, but selects interesting candidates from all the new materials that have been predicted. Altrove then uses its own AI models to generate potential recipes for these materials.
Currently, the company is testing these recipes one by one, producing a small sample of each material. Altrove has then developed a proprietary characterization technology that uses an X-ray diffractometer to understand whether the output material is performing as expected.
“It sounds trivial, but it's actually quite complicated to check what you've created and understand why. In most cases, what you've created isn't exactly what you were looking for in the first place,” Martin said.
This is where Altrove shines, as the company’s co-founder and CTO, Joonathan Laulainen, holds a PhD in materials science and is an expert in characterization. The startup owns IP related to characterization.
Learning from the characterization step to improve your recipe is essential when it comes to creating new materials. That’s why Altrove wants to automate its lab so it can test more recipes at once and speed up the feedback loop.
“We want to build the first high throughput methodology. In other words, pure prediction only gets you 30 percent of the way to a material that can actually be used industrially. The other 70 percent is iteration in real life. That’s why having an automated lab is so important, because you increase throughput and you can parallelize more experiments,” Martin said.
Altrove defines itself as a hardware-enabled AI company. It envisions selling licenses for its newly produced materials or creating those materials itself with external partners. The company raised €3.7 million in a round led by Contrarian companies with Emblem also participating. Several business angels also invested in the startup, such as Thomas Clozel (Owkin CEO), Julien Chaumond (Hugging Face CTO) and Nikolaj Deichmann (3Shape founder).
The startup is taking inspiration from biotech companies that are using AI to find new drugs and treatments, but this time for new materials. Altrove plans to build its automated lab by the end of the year and sell its first assets within 18 months.
