A startup called Dunia Innovations GmbH, a pioneer in artificial intelligence-driven materials discovery, has announced its ambitious goal to “change the world” after securing $11.5 million in funding today.

The round was led by Elaia and Redalpine, and saw participation from EIC, Pace Ventures, Kindred Capital, Deep Science Ventures, Anglo American and a number of angel investors.

Dunia wants to help decarbonize the chemical industry. To do this, the company is working to accelerate the important process of advanced materials discovery, with a particular focus on what it calls “power-to-x electrocatalysts.” These catalysts are essential for the production of green hydrogen and ammonia, as well as the conversion of carbon dioxide into more advanced chemicals, which will form the basis of future fuels, chemicals, fertilizers, plastics and more environmentally friendly textiles.

The startup claims to have created a proprietary “autonomous laboratory” that combines science-based AI algorithms with advanced chemico-robotic workflows and hardware representations derived from quantum chemistry. This is a new combination that gives Dunia a significant advantage over alternative machine learning-based materials discovery approaches, and it believes it can rapidly accelerate these processes.

The startup says its technology will address the urgent need for sustainable innovation in chemical materials discovery, which represents a trillion-dollar market opportunity. Catalysts drive 90% of today’s chemical processes and play a key role in the global energy transition to more environmentally friendly fuels.

As a result, the global market for electrochemical technologies is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2050. This forecast is based on the fact that conventional innovation cycles in materials discovery last decades, hampered by a slow and ineffective “design, manufacture, test”. , analyze”.

Dunia believes it can reduce the time needed to identify and manufacture new catalysts to just three years, accelerating efforts to transition to more sustainable chemicals and materials. Its physics-based AI integrates principles of physics and empirical verification into its algorithms, providing what it claims to be a robust and insightful approach to problem solving. It combines these AI algorithms with an advanced robotics platform designed to quickly run electrochemical experiments and capture data to ensure traceable and reproducible results.

“By combining machine learning with chemical robotics, we can iterate faster and generate high-quality data, significantly reducing the time it takes to discover new materials,” said Alexander Hammer, co-founder of Dunia.

Dunia claims to have validated its approach in a proof of concept, where it accelerated the formulation of an electrocatalytic ink, outperforming human researchers in speed and performance over a two-year period. Having proven its capabilities, Dunia will use the funding secured today to make its platform available to researchers around the world.

Michael Sidler, founding partner of Redalpine, said humanity’s unquenchable desire for energy and reliance on petrochemicals means there is an urgent need to accelerate the discovery of fuels and more sustainable chemicals.

“We need a radical disruption of existing R&D processes to create new catalyst agents for the efficient synthesis of these fuels,” he said. “Dunia’s AI-driven laboratory approach is the foundation for discovering these world-changing catalysts.”

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