Chemix
Assembly Line
GenAI-powered Battery Developer Chemix Closes Its $20M Series A Led by Ibex Investors
Chemix, the pioneer in leveraging a vertically integrated and GenAI-powered self-driving lab for the rapid development of next-gen EV batteries, announced the completion of $20 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Ibex Investors, an investment firm with $1 billion in assets under management, with participation from Mayfield Fund, Berkeley SkyDeck, and Urban Innovation Fund. The round also included strategic investors including BNP Paribas Solar Impulse Venture Fund (SIVF), Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III (KDDI CVC), and Porsche Ventures, the venture capital arm of the sports car manufacturer Porsche AG.
To practically and effectively integrate GenAI into the battery development process, Chemix embarked on a journey from day one to build its own battery lab and collect its own data - creating its battery-specific MIX™ R&D platform. In less than three years, the company has tested 10,000 commercial-format pouch, cylindrical, and prismatic cells, screened through 4,000 unique electrolyte formulations and more than 2,000 pairs of unique electrode designs, and collected a total of 4.5 million cycles. The high-quality, specially curated, and AI-trainable data, all gathered through physical experimentation, have played a critical role in training Chemix’s proprietary transformer-based deep neural network, which then autonomously generates better materials and cell designs on a daily basis on behalf of battery engineers and scientists. For Chemix, this marks just the beginning of truly unleashing the full potential of GenAI to transform the decades-old battery industry, one data point at a time – a vision that is shared among both existing and newly joining Chemix investors.
Chemix Brings Transformative AI Technologies to EV Battery Industry, Launching the First AI-Designed Battery in 2023
Chemix, the startup leveraging AI to rapidly build high-performance and environmentally sustainable EV batteries, unveiled MIX™, its AI-powered design platform specifically developed to accelerate the commercialization of next-generation EV batteries. By leveraging MIX, Chemix is poised to revolutionize the decades-old EV battery industry, similar to how AI has transformed drug discovery by accelerating pharmaceutical research and development. This will enable the pace of battery innovation to finally catch up with the ever-growing demand for better-performing, safer, and more sustainable EV batteries.
A battery is to an electric vehicle what a processor is to a computer – a critical technical component determining the entire system’s performance. Despite this central importance, the approach researchers have used to develop new battery materials and systems has remained largely unchanged for decades – until now. As opposed to the conventional method that relies on time- and labor-intensive processes for battery development and testing, Chemix adopts a revolutionary AI-based approach. This accelerates the discovery of the best battery materials, formulations, and recipes by leveraging large proprietary experimental datasets and cutting-edge proprietary algorithms. As a result, the company has created a vertically-integrated end-to-end battery development approach from scratch.
Chemix’s innovation combines battery-specific AI algorithms and their vast collected data to accelerate and optimize battery design – seamlessly integrated with the MIX platform. Chemix has used MIX to experimentally test over 2,000 unique battery material designs across more than 40 variations of commercially-relevant battery formats, accumulating nearly three million test cycles.