Contrarian Ventures
Assembly Line
Altrove closes €3.7 million to develop sustainable alternatives to critical materials
Altrove, a deep tech startup creating sustainable alternatives for critical materials, has raised €3.7 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Contrarian Ventures, Emblem and strong angel investors like Thomas Clozel (CEO Owkin), Julien Chaumond (CTO HuggingFace) and Nikolaj Deichmann (3Shape). The funding will accelerate the development of their core technology, currently focusing on substitutes for rare-earth compounds used in transition technologies, electric vehicles, and advanced electronics. The company was founded in early 2024 by Cambridge alumnus Dr. Joonatan Laulainen and second-time founder Thibaud Martin at Entrepreneur First.
Unlike recent AI materials startups, Altrove does not stop at predicting what new materials could exist but focuses on finding the optimal recipe to manufacture alternative materials at scale. Altrove developed a proprietary characterization technology to iteratively learn from each experiment, accelerating the discovery process up to 100 times.