In the last two years, innovation has accelerated in the development of new materials. And a new French startup called Altrove plans to play a role in this cycle of innovation. The deep-tech startup has already raised 3.7 million euros (about $4 million at current exchange rates).
If you are interested in the development of new materials, you may have noticed that many groups have shared important discoveries with the research community regarding materials prediction.
“Historically, over the last 50 years, R&D to find new materials has moved very slowly,” Altrove co-founder and CEO Thibaud Martin told TechCrunch. There have been several bottlenecks. And an important one was the starting point — how do you predict whether materials made of a handful of elements can theoretically exist?
When you put two different chemical elements together, there are tens of thousands of possibilities. When you want to work with three different elements, there are tens of thousands of combinations. With four elements, you have 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 could potentially exist in a steady state. “More stable materials have been forecast in the last nine months than in the previous 49 years,” Martin said.
But solving this congestion is only part of the equation. Knowing that new materials can exist is not enough when it comes to making new materials. You have to come up with the recipe.
“A recipe is not just about what you put together. It also has to do with proportions, at what temperature, in what order, for how long. So there are many factors, many variables involved in how new materials are made,” Martin said.
Altrove focuses on inorganic materials and starts with rare earth elements more specifically. There is a buying opportunity here with rare earth elements because they are hard to come by, prices vary widely and they often come from China. Many companies are trying to rely less on China as part of their supply chain to avoid regulatory uncertainties.
Create an automated repeat 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 artificial intelligence models to generate potential recipes for these materials.
Right now, the company is testing these recipes one by one and producing a tiny sample of each material. After that, Altrove developed a proprietary characterization technology that uses an X-ray diffractometer to tell if the output material is performing as expected.
“It sounds trivial, but it’s actually very complicated to check what you’ve built and understand why. In most cases, what you’ve built isn’t exactly what you were looking for in the first place,” Martin said.
This is where Altrove shines as company co-founder and CTO Joonathan Laulainen has a PhD in materials science and is an expert in characterization. The startup owns an IP associated with the designation.
Learning from the characterization step to improve your recipe is key when it comes to crafting 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 create the first high-performance methodology. In other words, pure prediction only gets you 30% of the way to getting a material that can actually be used industrially. The other 70% involves repetition in real life. That’s why it’s so important to have an automated lab because you increase throughput and you can parallelize more experiments,” Martin said.
Altrove describes itself as a hardware-enabled AI company. It believes it will sell licenses for its newly produced materials or manufacture those materials itself with third-party partners. The company raised €3.7 million in a round led by Contrarian Ventures with Emblem also participating. Several business angels also invested in the startup, including Thomas Clozel (CEO of Owkin), Julien Chaumond (CTO Hugging Face) and Nikolaj Deichmann (founder of 3Shape).
The startup draws inspiration from biotech companies that have turned to artificial intelligence 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 asset within 18 months.
