chemistry
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The Only Two Bets BlueYard Will Make: Utopia or Oblivion
BlueYard hands early-stage founders a check between $500K and $5M to chase problems most investors call radioactive - fusion reactors, hypersonic defense, decentralized money, engineered cells. Since 2016 it has backed Solana, Groq, IonQ and Filecoin from a partnership split between Berlin and the US.
b12 Labs
b12 Labs is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator S25) building AI agents for pharmaceutical and biotech chemistry. Its platform designs synthesis routes, plans and optimizes reactions, and turns those plans into robot-ready code for automated labs, aiming to compress early-stage drug discovery from years to months. The company was founded in 2025 by chemists Zlatko Joncev and Andres Bran, who met at EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence.
Integrated Biosciences
Integrated Biosciences is a Redwood City biotech founded in 2022 that fuses optogenetics, chemistry, and AI to discover small-molecule drugs for age-related diseases. Its optogenetic screening platform uses light to control cellular biology at millisecond and micron scale, generating clean data to train an explainable-AI drug-discovery engine. The company has published in Nature - including a new structural class of antibiotics - and raised $17.2M in seed funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
Atinary Technologies
Atinary Technologies is a Swiss-American deeptech startup whose no-code SDLabs platform pairs machine learning with lab robotics to run Self-Driving Labs - closed-loop experiments that learn and adapt on the fly, accelerating R&D in chemistry, materials, pharma and climate tech by orders of magnitude.
Numat
Numat is a Chicago-based advanced-materials company and the first to commercialize metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) at industrial scale. Its molecularly engineered, programmable 'sponges' capture, store, and separate hazardous chemicals for semiconductor, defense, and energy customers, reducing the impact of chemical products and processes on human health and the environment.
Albert Invent
Albert Invent builds an AI-native operating system for chemists and materials scientists, unifying electronic lab notebooks, LIMS, regulatory compliance and predictive AI into one cloud platform that aims to compress decades-long R&D cycles into weeks.
Yoneda Labs
Yoneda Labs is building the foundation model for chemical manufacturing - think of it as the AI brain that tells chemists exactly which conditions to use to make a reaction work, before they spend months running dead-end experiments. Founded by three Cambridge graduates and backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the company's software suite (Predict, Optimize, Analyze) compresses reaction optimization timelines from months to days. Their first named partnership with Symeres pushed cross-coupling reaction yields from ~30% to over 90%. The goal: become the universal AI layer for the $5 trillion chemical industry.