materials-science
(35)
Area Science Park puts a laboratory in the startup cheque
In Trieste, a public research organisation pairs funding with access to microscopes, genomics and computing. Its bet: give difficult ideas the equipment and expertise to prove themselves.
Schrödinger Spent 30 Years Teaching Computers Chemistry. Now It Wants Every Lab to Predict Before It Pours.
The molecular-software veteran has a blunt pitch for modern R&D: compute first, synthesize less. Its own numbers show both the leverage of that idea and the expensive limits of prediction.
MITO Spent a Decade Making Graphene Boring Enough for the Factory Floor
Graphene had extraordinary lab results and an ordinary factory problem: it clumped, wandered and asked manufacturers to change too much. MITO built its business around the unglamorous fix - make the wonder material behave like an additive people can actually use.
The Texas Startup That Coats Roofs So They Sweat Heat Back at the Sky
NanoTech Materials built a ceramic particle that radiates heat away instead of trapping it. Now it is selling that trick to roofers, oil refineries and towns bracing for the next wildfire.
The Company Keeping Water Out of 15 Million Cars
It started in a Malden kitchen and now guards the circuit boards inside 15 million cars. actnano bet that a gel could do what a hard shell couldn't - and that dropping the fluorine would become the whole point.
The Fund Betting That the Hard Problems Are Made of Atoms, Not Apps
A $66 million debut fund is putting first checks into space refueling, biometric firearms and board games - on the theory that the world's hardest problems are made of atoms, not apps.
The Venture Fund With an Admissions Requirement: You Had to Go to Oxford
A Palo Alto fund turned an alumni network into an asset class - if your startup wants in, someone in the founding story has to have walked through an Oxford quad.
The Invisible Chemistry Inside Modern Life
Momentive rarely appears on the box. Its silicones, silanes and specialty additives are the reason thousands of other products can survive heat, moisture, motion and time.
3M
The Post-it Note is the famous part. The more revealing story is the science hidden in factories, fiber connections, race cars and ordinary drawers - a portfolio built to make other products work better.
Patsnap
Patsnap is a Singapore-founded innovation intelligence company whose AI-native platform helps R&D and IP teams search, analyze, and act on the world's patents, scientific literature, and market data. Used by more than 10,000 organizations across 50-plus countries, its flagship Eureka platform applies large language models and specialized AI agents to compress labor-intensive tasks - prior art search, freedom-to-operate analysis, patent landscaping, and drug-discovery intelligence - from weeks into minutes.
Polymateria
Polymateria is a London-based materials science company that has developed Biotransformation, a masterbatch additive that lets everyday polyolefin plastics fully biodegrade in the open environment within about a year - breaking down into a wax that microbes consume, leaving only CO2, water and biomass with no microplastics. Its technology underpins the BSI PAS 9017 standard and is sold to converters and brands worldwide through its consumer-facing Lyfecycle brand.
6K
6K is a North Andover, Massachusetts advanced materials company that uses its proprietary UniMelt microwave plasma technology - which reaches roughly 6,000 degrees, hence the name - to produce battery cathode materials and additive-manufacturing metal powders faster, cleaner, and with fewer processing steps than conventional methods. Spun out of research at MIT and the University of Connecticut, the company operates through two divisions, 6K Energy (battery cathode active materials) and 6K Additive (sustainably sourced metal powders), and is building a domestic U.S. supply chain for critical materials backed by federal grants and more than $348 million in venture funding.
Kintra Fibers
Kintra Fibers is a Brooklyn-based materials science company developing a bio-based, biodegradable alternative to conventional polyester. Built on polybutylene succinate (PBS) derived from plant sugars rather than fossil fuels, Kintra's yarn performs like standard polyester and runs on existing melt-spinning equipment, but composts in controlled conditions and sheds far less persistent microplastic. Founded in 2018 by Billy McCall and Alissa Baier-Lentz, the H&M Group-backed company has raised roughly $10M total and is piloting its fiber with brands including Inditex, BESTSELLER, Reformation and PANGAIA.
Nabaco® Inc.
Nabaco® Inc. is a San Marcos, Texas materials-science company that makes self-assembling natural barrier coatings to keep fresh produce fresh longer and cut food waste. Its flagship product, NatuWrap®, is a GRAS-listed edible coating built from clay and plant extracts that locks moisture in while keeping oxygen and microbes out - applied by spraying, dipping or brushing at a fraction of the cost of rival coatings. Founded on nanotechnology research from Texas State University, Nabaco is expanding into pre-harvest crop protection (Envello) and post-harvest processing aids (Vanterra) to protect food across the whole supply chain.
NxLite
NxLite (formerly 3E Nano) makes next-generation, transparent energy-control coatings for glass and lightweight polymers. Spun out of the University of Toronto in 2015, the company's patented nano-thin, low-emissivity and solar-control coatings are air-stable and can be applied to glass, acrylic (PMMA) and polycarbonate, cutting the heat that windows gain or lose. NxLite sells to window and door makers, refrigeration and transportation manufacturers, and building-retrofit customers, and runs a 45,000-square-foot Advanced Innovation & Manufacturing (AIM) Center in Canton, Michigan.
Simplifyber
Simplifyber is a North Carolina biomaterials company reinventing how soft goods are made. Its proprietary natural-fiber liquid, Fybron, is injected into 3D molds to form fabric directly, skipping the spinning, weaving, cutting, and sewing steps of conventional textile production. Founded in 2021 by fashion veteran Maria Intscher-Owrang and Phil Cohen, the company targets fashion, footwear, bags, automotive and aviation interiors, and consumer packaging with a cellulose-based, largely biodegradable alternative to fossil-derived materials. It closed a $12M Series A led by Suzano Ventures in April 2025.
QC Ware Corp.
QC Ware is a Palo Alto-based enterprise software company that builds quantum and quantum-inspired tools for hard scientific problems. Founded in 2014 by veterans of NASA Ames, it started as a hardware-agnostic quantum cloud platform (Forge) and evolved into Promethium, a GPU-accelerated quantum chemistry SaaS that runs density functional theory calculations on molecules up to thousands of atoms, claiming speeds 10 to 100 times faster than legacy tools. The company also runs Q2B, the largest annual practical quantum computing conference, and counts Goldman Sachs, Airbus, BMW and Covestro among its collaborators and investors.
Thintronics
Thintronics is a San Francisco-based advanced materials company reinventing the humble insulator - the dielectric films that sit between the copper layers of every chip and circuit board. Founded in 2019 by chemist Stefan Pastine, the company designs new insulating materials from the molecular level up, aiming to deliver faster, lower-loss, lower-power interconnects for AI data centers, high-speed networking, and RF/millimeter-wave systems. Its pitch is pointed: challenge the Japanese incumbent Ajinomoto, which has held more than 90% of the dielectric build-up film market for three decades, with a US-made alternative built for the terabit age.
1s1 Energy
1s1 Energy is a materials-science company making green hydrogen cheaper by rethinking the guts of the electrolyzer. Instead of the fluorinated (PFAS) membranes the industry has leaned on for decades, 1s1 builds boron-based proton-exchange membranes and electrochemical components that its partners report can produce a kilogram of hydrogen using roughly 70% of the energy of incumbent devices - already hitting efficiency targets the U.S. Department of Energy set for 2031. Founded in 2019 and run out of Portola Valley, California with labs in Lisbon and Campinas, Brazil, the company sells core components to electrolyzer and fuel-cell makers and runs pilots with utilities and heavy industry.
Crystal Sonic
Crystal Sonic is a Phoenix, Arizona deep-tech startup that uses sound to cut semiconductor costs. Its patented Sonic Lift-off (SLO) technology acts as an 'acoustic scalpel,' peeling thin device layers off expensive wafers so the underlying substrate can be reused instead of ground into dust. Legacy manufacturing wastes 90% or more of substrate material, and substrates can account for up to half of a device's cost - Crystal Sonic wants to reclaim that. Spun out of an Arizona State University lab in 2018, the company has won backing from NASA, the Department of Energy, the NSF, and Lam Capital.
Everywhere Apparel
Everywhere Apparel is a Los Angeles-based materials science company that turns textile waste into 100% recycled cotton clothing through its proprietary, GRS-certified CirCot fiber system. Founded in 2019 by three Stanford graduates, it sells blank and custom apparel to brands, bands, screen printers and uniform programs, and closes the loop with a free QR-code take-back program that recycles worn garments back into new products.
Pascal
Pascal is a Cambridge, Massachusetts climate-tech company commercializing solid refrigerants to replace the greenhouse-gas coolants that make air conditioners, heat pumps, and refrigerators bad for the climate. Spun out of Harvard in 2023, Pascal builds cooling systems around barocaloric materials - wax-like layered solids that absorb and release heat when squeezed and released - working at pressures low enough to run on today's mass-market HVAC hardware. The company raised an $8M seed round in 2024 and aims to eliminate refrigerant emissions while cutting cost and boosting efficiency.
Tynt Technologies, Inc.
Tynt Technologies is a Boulder, Colorado materials-science startup building dynamic light-control film that lets glass and plastic go from clear to black - and back - in under 10 seconds. Its patented Reversible Metal Electrodeposition (RME) platform, spun out of Stanford and CU Boulder, plates a thin metal layer on demand and dissolves it into invisible ions to restore clarity, all on less than one volt. Because the system is bi-stable it holds any tint level without drawing continuous power. Tynt is aiming the technology at everything from AR smart eyewear to building facades, positioning itself as a faster, higher-contrast alternative to conventional electrochromic smart glass.
XTRIUM
XTRIUM is an Austin-based deeptech startup building an AI-powered intelligence layer for the material world. Its platform helps manufacturers, product developers, and procurement teams choose the right materials, discover new applications for existing ones, and diversify suppliers - compressing sourcing timelines from roughly 12 months to about 5 days. Using graph neural networks and combinatorial matching, XTRIUM aims to be the central hub of a materials research, development, and sourcing ecosystem.
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.
LuxCreo
LuxCreo is a digital manufacturing company turning dental clinics and labs into same-day production floors. Its patented LEAP (Light Enabled Additive Production) printers, ActiveMemory polymers, and LuxFlow software combine to deliver FDA-cleared, directly 3D-printed clear aligners, night guards, dentures and crowns - cutting weeks of traditional workflow down to hours.
Gamma Alloys Inc
Gamma Alloys is a Santa Clarita, California advanced-materials company that reinforces aluminum with homogeneously distributed nano-ceramic particles to create metal matrix composites that are stiffer, stronger, more wear-resistant and stable across a wider temperature range than conventional aluminum. Its materials ship as wrought stock (bar, tube, plate), additive powders and additive wire for metal 3D printing, and are aimed at aerospace, defense, automotive, motorsports and even luxury goods. Founded in 2008 and led by CEO Mark Sommer, the company drew an investment from Boeing HorizonX Ventures in 2017 and partners with precision manufacturer Del West USA.
Quantum Boost
Quantum Boost is a London-based deep-tech startup building an AI formulation assistant for the chemicals and materials industry. Its platform uses Bayesian optimization and machine learning to help R&D scientists design smarter experiments, cut the number of lab trials needed to hit a target, and surface insights from existing experimental data. The company claims its approach reaches formulation targets roughly 2-5x faster than traditional Design of Experiments (DoE), and serves teams working on inks, paints and coatings, pharmaceuticals, and specialty chemicals.
Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building what it calls scientific superintelligence: an 'AI Science Factory' that fuses generative AI with fully autonomous, robotic laboratories. Its platform generates hypotheses, designs and runs physical experiments, reads the results, and decides what to test next - closing the loop of the scientific method without a human pipetting at every step. Spun out of Flagship Pioneering's labs in 2023 and unveiled from stealth in March 2025, Lila has raised roughly $550 million and reached a valuation around $1.3 billion, with autonomous-science units aimed at life, chemical, and materials science.
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.