AI start-up Dunia raises $11.5 million

The Berlin-based start-up Dunia Innovations has raised $11.5 million to accelerate the discovery of advanced materials by combining machine learning with robotic lab technology. The company is focused on electrocatalysts for making green hydrogen or ammonia and on converting carbon dioxide into chemicals.

With the standard research sequence of design, make, test, and analyze, bringing a new catalyst to market can take several years or even more. Dunia reckons its approach can reduce the timeline to less than 3 years. “You can’t solve this problem with software alone, but by combining machine learning with chemical robotics, we can iterate faster and generate high-quality data, drastically cutting down the time needed to discover new materials,” computational chemist Alexander Hammer, who is Dunia’s CEO and cofounder, says in a press release.

Dunia says it will direct a chunk of the funds to hiring new talent, including people with expertise in both artificial intelligence and chemistry. The company has 12 employees today and expects to have about 20 by next summer. It will also invest in a robotic lab. “We’re building essentially a first-of-a-kind commercial self-driving lab specifically for electrocatalysts,” Hammer says.

The venture capital firm Energy Revolution Ventures estimates in a recent study that the global market for electrochemical technology will be worth $1.5 trillion by 2050.

Dunia says it is already collaborating with major chemical companies. “But now I think we are ready for our first full-scale commercial partnership,” Hammer says.

Dunia is part of a wave of companies, from start-ups to the world’s biggest software firms, that are applying AI to discovering novel materials for green chemistry.

They include Microsoft, which is using AI to identify candidates for making solid electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries. Meta disclosed recently that it will release free datasets and models that could enable scientists using AI to discover new materials much faster than standard approaches.

Another German AI start-up, Dude Chem, is focused on improving pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, while the UK start-up Solve is pursuing process improvement more broadly. One of the angel investors in Dunia, the University of Glasgow chemistry professor Lee Cronin, also founded the AI-based chemistry start-up Chemify.