Companies working in batteries, semiconductors and medical devices generate massive amounts of data — and much of it ends up scattered across spreadsheets and legacy systems, making it difficult to use to improve products or understand failures.
startup based in San Francisco Altarwhich just secured $7 million in seed funding, says it has built a layer of artificial intelligence designed to bridge these data gaps and bring fragmented technical information into a single platform. The round was led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures and Jeff Dean.
Altara was founded in 2025 by Eva Tuecke (pictured right), who previously conducted particle physics research at Fermilab and worked at SpaceX. and Catherine Yeo (pictured left), former AI engineer at Warp. The two met while studying computer science at Harvard University.
“Imagine if you’re a company making next-generation batteries and a battery fails during cell testing in the R&D process,” Yeo said. “An engineering team has to go in and manually review a lot of different data sources, anything from their sensor logs to temperature data, humidity data. They’re cross-referencing historical failure reports.”
Scientists and engineers often spend weeks or months on this “scavenger hunt” across a multitude of data sources just to diagnose and resolve failures, he said.
Altara claims its AI dramatically reduces the time required for this process, condensing weeks of manual data sorting into minutes.
Greylock partner Corinne Riley compares what Altara is doing in the natural sciences to the role of website reliability engineers in the software world. If a system fails, “an SRE will come in and look at the company’s observability stack,” he said. “Someone pushed a change in the code and that’s what caused the outage.”
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, California
|
13-15 October 2026
For example, Resolve powered by Greylock, which is valued at 1.5 billion dollarsuses artificial intelligence to diagnose software failures. Altara’s vision is to act as a hardware equivalent, determining exactly what went wrong when a battery or semiconductor fails.
Altara isn’t the only startup using AI to accelerate development in the natural sciences. Startups like Periodic Labs and Radical AI they also tackle scientific research from the ground up.
However, Altara takes a different, much less capital-intensive approach. Rather than trying to replace decades of research and manufacturing companies, Altara provides a layer of intelligence that plugs into their existing data.
In fact, Greylock’s Riley sees artificial intelligence for physical science as the “next great frontier” and predicts an impending explosion of development in the field.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
