Mattiq raises funds to discover new materials for energy transition

Inspired by high-throughput techniques that led to breakthroughs in DNA sequencing and drug discovery, the Chicago start-up Mattiq has raised $15 million in seed funding to speed the discovery of materials needed to wean the world off fossil fuels.

Mattiq, previously known as Stoicheia, prints millions of tiny particles onto chips and tests some of them to determine if they have the properties the company is seeking. Characterizing all the materials would be slow and costly, so an artificial intelligence tool uses data from those initial experiments to suggest which candidates should be tested next.

The suggested materials are already on the chip, so the experiment can proceed immediately. “This gives us the ability to go through the materials space, the design space, much faster,” says Andrey Ivankin, Mattiq’s chief technology officer.

The company, based on technology developed by Northwestern University chemist Chad Mirkin, is searching for materials used in electrochemical reactions, such as the splitting of water into hydrogen or the conversion of carbon dioxide into chemicals.

“A lot of these reactions are known . . . but they’re not economically feasible,” says Mattiq CEO Jeff Erhardt. “By doing this better, not sticking with the status quo, we can make that green premium smaller.”

Other companies, and many university research labs, are also using high-throughput methods to discover new materials. Last year, Wildcat Discovery Technologies raised $90 million to search for new battery materials. And Kebotix is using similar technology to develop materials for sealants, lights, pigments, and other applications.

Shyue Ping Ong, a materials researcher at the University of California ,San Diego, says high-throughput approaches are promising, and researchers have made a lot of progress. But he doesn’t know of any products invented this way that have been commercialized.

“Just because something is found in a research lab doesn’t mean you will make it into commercial application,” he says, noting that new materials need to be cheap and easily scalable. Ivankin says Mattiq hopes to overcome those challenges by simulating real world conditions during experiments.

Commercialization challenges aside, Ping Ong says high-throughput methods such as Mattiq’s will generate lots of valuable data, making it easier for all researchers to predict the properties of new materials. “We need reliable experimental data,” he says. “If they have good control over the experiment, those data will be immensely valuable.”