The Profile · AI for Materials
Malur Narayan
He is building a search engine for matter - and he has been impatient with the slow way since 1992.
He is building a search engine for matter - and he has been impatient with the slow way since 1992.
Somewhere right now an alloy that could save a manufacturer millions is sitting unused, because the person who needs it has never heard its name. Malur Narayan finds that intolerable.
That nuisance - useful matter that nobody can find - is the entire premise of XTRIUM, the company Narayan co-founded in 2025 and runs as CEO from Austin, Texas. The pitch is unglamorous and enormous at the same time: materials don't have a search engine. Chemistry has databases. Procurement has spreadsheets. Industries have their own private folklore about what works. But there is no single place to ask, "what else could this material do, and who would pay for it?" Narayan is building that place.
XTRIUM calls itself an intelligence layer for materials. Feed it a set of requirements - performance, cost, compliance, sustainability, lead time - and it scans millions of options and hands back a ranked "Top 5" with match scores. It works the other direction too: hand it a material sitting idle in inventory and it suggests the industries that have never thought to buy it. The company's headline numbers are deliberately blunt. Ninety percent-plus time savings. A twelve-month research slog reduced to roughly five days.
"Make finding a new application for any material as fast and easy as an internet search."
That sentence is the whole company in fourteen words. It also explains why Narayan, who could comfortably be advising boards and giving keynotes, instead chose to sit in the founder's chair of a deep-tech startup chasing one of the least sexy and most stubborn problems in industry. The matching problem is everywhere - aerospace, automotive, packaging, energy - and almost nobody has tried to solve it horizontally.
His co-founders complete the triangle: Dr. Sirisha Kuchimanchi as Co-Founder and COO, and Raghunandan Mathur as Co-Founder and CTO. Narayan is the one who has been doing this longest, and the one most likely to tell you the idea is bigger than it looks.
Before he could pitch it, he did his homework in the most Narayan way possible. At Plug and Play Tech Center he mapped more than sixty startups across Europe and North America working at the seam where AI meets materials science, chemistry, simulation, and lab automation. The point wasn't to scout competitors. It was to prove a hunch: that "AI for materials discovery and development is starting to look like a real category in applied AI." Once the category was real, the company had a reason to exist.
In the early 1990s, while most of the industry was still arguing about waterfall charts, Narayan was running self-managed software teams and researching adaptive learning algorithms.
Reverse engineering. Adaptive learning algorithms in machine learning. These were his research topics three decades before "ML engineer" became a job title on a business card. The detail matters less as a credential than as a tell: Narayan has spent his whole career allergic to the slow, manual, committee-bound way of doing things. Self-managed teams in the early '90s were a quiet act of rebellion against the org chart.
From there the resume reads like a tour of how global technology actually gets built. At Nortel Networks he held leadership roles including Vice President and General Manager for Carrier Market Development across Asia, and Portfolio Vice President for Enterprise in Asia - jobs that meant standing up new markets on the other side of the world. At Tata Consultancy Services he served as a Vice President across Technology, Emerging Technology, and eventually led the Sustainability go-to-market for North America.
Wireless networks, global consulting, enterprise AI, advanced materials - one throughline: turning bold ideas into real-world impact.
Somewhere in that arc he became a serial founder, co-founding two AI startups and serving as CTO before XTRIUM moved him into the CEO seat. One of them, STRIDES.ai, had him leading product development and business strategy - the founder's full-contact sport of building the thing and selling it at the same time.
The education underneath all of this is its own small marathon: a Computer Engineering degree, a Master's in Computer Science from Western University in Canada, an MBA from the Telfer School of Management, and Harvard's Advanced Management Program stacked on top. It is the credential set of someone who kept deciding he wasn't finished learning. He has also taught - lecturing on international business for Executive MBA programs at Cornell, Imperial College London, and Queen's University.
Put plainly: by the time Narayan started a materials-AI company, he had already built networks, sold to the C-suite on three continents, shipped enterprise products, and trained machines back when training a machine meant something very different. The startup isn't a swerve. It's the place all the threads finally meet.
There is a pattern in how he describes his own work, and it rewards a close read. He keeps using the language of bridges and matching - connecting materials to applications, suppliers to demand, one industry's surplus to another's shortage. The vocabulary of a man who spent years in carrier networks and consulting, where the value was never in the node but in the connection between nodes. XTRIUM is that instinct turned loose on the physical world: not inventing new matter, but routing the matter we already have to the place it's needed most.
"There is no single source of truth for comparing and navigating material properties across industries."
— Malur Narayan, on the problem XTRIUM exists to fixSelf-managed software teams and research into reverse engineering and adaptive learning algorithms - machine learning before the hype.
Leadership at Nortel Networks, opening carrier and enterprise markets across Asia as VP & GM.
Vice President roles at Tata Consultancy Services, ending with Sustainability GTM for North America.
Co-founded two AI startups including STRIDES.ai, serving as CTO and leading product and business strategy.
Co-founded XTRIUM. Onstage at Austin Tech Week, MoFo Fall 2025 Pitch Day, and AI for Good.
Make materials searchable. Turn idle inventory into revenue. Make supply chains resilient before they break.
Narayan's argument is almost annoyingly common-sense. Companies miss revenue because they overlook materials commonly used in other industries. Alloy manufacturers fail to reach clients outside their home market, even when their product would be perfect, because nobody does the cross-industry research to connect the two. The result is a quiet, continuous waste: materials that could be sold, problems that could be solved, sitting on opposite sides of a wall nobody built on purpose.
Traditional materials discovery, he points out, takes months of manual research. In a world where supply chains snap without warning, months is a handicap that can sink a product line. XTRIUM's promise is to turn that handicap into an afternoon - to give product developers alternatives in days, to give procurement teams qualified backup suppliers before a disruption hits, and to give manufacturers a read on whether a new material has a market before they sink R&D into it.
It is, in other words, the same instinct that made him build self-managed teams in 1992, scaled up to the entire physical economy. The slow, manual, siloed way is the enemy. The job is to make the answer arrive before the question gets expensive.
A founder is rarely only a founder. Narayan describes his focus, only half about business, as "Tech for good" - equity, sustainability, and mental health.
He is a public advocate for mental-health awareness, a cause he supports actively rather than rhetorically, and he frames much of his work around AI and technology serving people rather than the other way around. He has sat on boards and described himself as a tech leader across AI/ML, mobile, and quantum - with the qualifier "for good" attached every time.
Away from the laptop he is a trail hiker, a music maker, and a gardener - three hobbies that all reward patience, which is a funny thing for a man so impatient with slow processes at work. Maybe that's the trade. Build fast, then go sit in the dirt and wait for something to grow.
And then there's the homework habit. The same person who maps sixty startups before starting a company is the person who, after an MBA, decided he wanted a Harvard program on top, and after years in industry decided he wanted to teach EMBA students at Cornell and Imperial. Curiosity, in his case, doesn't seem to switch off. It just changes venues.
"AI for materials discovery is starting to look like a real category."
— And he intends to be early to itProfile compiled from public sources: XTRIUM, LinkedIn, AI for Good (ITU), Dallas Startup Week, The Org, Heat Treat Today, REFASHIOND Ventures, Austin Tech Week. Facts only - where the record is silent, so are we.