Materials Nexus, a London, UK-based advanced materials company, raised £2M in funding.
The round was led by Ada Ventures, with participation from High-Tech Gründerfonds, The University of Cambridge, National Security specialists MD One Ventures, as well as new institutional investor Michael Eisenberg at Genuine Capital Ventures, and angel investors Jasmin Thomas, Andrew MacKay and Hugh Smith. Existing investors include Carbon13, G-force, Katapult and ET Capital.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate development of its materials.
Led by Founder and CEO Jonathan Bean, Materials Nexus is a deep tech company on a mission to discover materials to build sustainable technologies such as renewable energy generation, energy storage and electric transportation at the core of everyday items. The company’s technology combines AI with quantum mechanics to accurately and rapidly predict novel, high-performing and sustainable materials.
Jonathan Bean is a theoretical physicist from the University of Cambridge who, during his time as research associate, identified the need for a modelling platform to accelerate the uptake of new materials to address the climate crisis. Over the last two years, Bean and his team – which includes computational physicist Robert Forrest, chemist Dr Jon Pillow and commercial lead Nic Stirk – have been working on an AI solution that reduces the need to conduct physical experiments to discover new materials. They have achieved this by building their own proprietary datasets and machine learning algorithms which are capable of predicting the properties of new material compositions.
The company plans to use the new funding to conduct real-world projects to demonstrate the efficacy of its AI technologies. Applications include finding alternative materials used in batteries and semiconductors, superconductors used in green technologies which currently rely on materials that need substantial cooling or high pressure.
FinSMEs
28/07/2023