University of Cambridge
Canvas Category Consultancy : Research : Academic
The University of Cambridge is one of the world’s foremost research universities. The University is made up of 31 Colleges and over 150 departments, faculties, schools and other institutions. Its mission is ‘to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence’.
Assembly Line
Dunia Innovations scores $11.5M for its ‘self-driving lab’ to speed up discovery of new materials
Dunia Innovations, a Berlin-based deeptech startup specialising in AI-driven material discovery, has secured $11.5 million in funding co-led by French VC Elaia (which recently invested in Qantev and dottxt) and Swiss VC redalpine (which recently backed Basecamp Research and Legalfly). Other backers included the EIC, Pace Ventures, Kindred Capital, Deep Science Ventures, Anglo American, and industry expert angels.
The German startup is using AI-driven technology and its automated lab to speed up the discovery of advanced materials. The company aims to reduce the time it typically takes to develop new materials, which can often be decades. This is part of a broader focus on helping the clean energy transition. By 2050, the global market for electrochemical technologies, which play a key role in energy storage and conversion, is projected to reach $1.5 trillion. Dunia’s approach is intended to accelerate innovation in this field, contributing to the advancement of clean energy solutions.
Traditional chemical research relies on slow and inefficient “design, make, test, analyse” (DMTA) cycles. Dunia rethinks this process using advanced chemical-robotic workflows and proprietary quantum chemistry-derived material representations. These representations together with their in-house proprietary datasets give Dunia’s machine learning (ML) systems a competitive edge over other black-box ML approaches, allowing for faster material discovery.
Neutreeno: University Of Cambridge Spinout Raises $5 Million (Seed)
Neutreeno, a deep tech startup spinning out of the University of Cambridge, announced it secured a $5 million seed round with support from a global syndicate of mission-aligned investors.
Companies typically have a large percentage of emissions in their value chain, but they will fail to achieve net zero goals unless they double the emissions reduction pace by 2030. This is hard due to a lack of primary value chain data, the inability to influence suppliers and the high cost of decarbonization.
Neutreeno’s proprietary process networks, based on mass and energy flow research, significantly minimize the primary data burden on suppliers and allow enterprises to map product lines faster and with greater precision than existing tools. Their easy-to-use and affordable digital system automatically pinpoints solutions that reduce emissions and costs across thousands of suppliers.
Cement recycling method could help solve one of the world’s biggest climate challenges
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a method to produce very low-emission concrete at scale – an innovation that could be transformative in the transition to net zero. The method, which the researchers say is “an absolute miracle”, uses the electrically-powered arc furnaces used for steel recycling to simultaneously recycle cement, the carbon-hungry component of concrete.
The Cambridge researchers found that used cement is an effective substitute for lime flux, which is used in steel recycling to remove impurities and normally ends up as a waste product known as slag. But by replacing lime with used cement, the end product is recycled cement that can be used to make new concrete. The cement recycling method developed by the Cambridge researchers, reported in the journal Nature, does not add any significant costs to concrete or steel production and significantly reduces emissions from both concrete and steel, due to the reduced need for lime flux.
Sparxell Raises $3.2m to Advance Development of Sustainable Pigments
Sparxell, the UK-based developer of high-performance, sustainable, plant-based pigments, has completed a $3.2m funding round (comprising seed investments, grants, and awards) to accelerate development and commercialisation of products which will eliminate synthetic chemicals from colourants in multi-billion dollar markets including in cosmetics, fashion, paint, and packaging.
The Circular Innovation Fund, a global venture capital fund jointly managed by Demeter and Cycle Capital with L’Oréal as an anchor investor, participated in the seed funding alongside others including SpaceX-backer Futre Communities Capital, PDS Ventures, Katapult, Joyance Partners and SNØCAP VC.
CSIRO achieves record efficiency for next-gen roll-to-roll printed solar cells
Scientists from Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, have led an international team to a clean energy breakthrough by setting a new efficiency record for fully roll-to-roll printed solar cells. Printed onto thin plastic films, this lightweight and flexible solar technology will help meet the growing demand for renewable energy by expanding the boundaries of where solar cells can be used. The team demonstrated performances for solar cells of 15.5% efficiency on a small scale and 11% for a 50 cm2 module, which is a record for fully printed solar cells.
CSIRO is actively seeking industry partners to further develop and commercialise this technology.
London-based Didimi raises €880k pre-seed to bring interoperability to the construction industry
Didimi, a digital twins and information management platform for the construction industry, announced that it has raised €880k in a pre-seed investment. The round is led by the leading deep tech VC the Creator Fund. The fresh capital will serve to expand its B2B product offering into the construction information management sector.
Founded in 2023 as a spin-off from the University of Cambridge, Didimi is a London-based startup that is building a new platform to transform information exchange and management in the construction industry.
Xampla raises US$17.6 from cleantech investors to drive down bio-based coatings costs
Xampla has raised a total of US$17.6 million in funding to advance the production of its plant-based materials, following a recent financing round including new investors, including clean tech backers CIECH Ventures, part of an international developing chemical group employing over 3,000 people.
The money will be strategically allocated to expanding the applications of Xampla’s consumer brand, Morro, into new markets. Developed by 15 years of research at the University of Cambridge, UK, Morro materials are fully biodegradable, home compostable and food safe, offering high strength, grease and oxygen barrier properties.
How factories are deploying AI on production lines
Augury’s sensors used in PepsiCo factories have been trained on huge volumes of audio data, to be able to detect faults such as wearing on conveyor belts and bearings, while analysing machine vibrations. By also collecting information and insights into equipment health on the whole, such as identifying when a machine might fail again in future, the technology lets workers schedule maintenance in advance, and avoid having to react to machine errors as they occur.
Prof Brintrup, professor of digital manufacturing at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, leads the Institute for Manufacturing’s Supply Chain AI Lab, which has developed its own predictive mechanism to identify where ingredients such as palm oil may have been used in a product, but disguised under a different name on its label. The lab’s recent research suggested that palm oil can go by 200 different names in the US - and these might not stand out to eco-conscious consumers.
Machine learning predictions of superalloy microstructure
Gaussian process regression machine learning with a physically-informed kernel is used to model the phase compositions of nickel-base superalloys. The model delivers good predictions for laboratory and commercial superalloys. Additionally, the model predicts the phase composition with uncertainties unlike the traditional CALPHAD method.
Fetch.ai x Festo x University of Cambridge
We are incredibly excited to announce that we are collaborating with Festo and the Manufacturing Analytics Group at the University of Cambridge, Institute of Manufacturing (IfM), to provide research and recommendations to successfully develop a multi-agent system architecture for distributed manufacturing. With the use of our Fetch.ai technology stack, including the Autonomous Economic Agents framework and blockchain in synchronized harmony, our goal is to transform the existing manufacturing control systems, delivering a scalable solution for the 21st century and beyond.
Despite advancements in technology, the manufacturing industry remains rife with challenges and inefficiencies, lowering productivity, utilization, production variety. Distributed Manufacturing is a relatively new paradigm proposed to overcome some of these challenges. In Distributed Manufacturing, producers lease excess capacity for customized, low volume high variety orders. Whilst a promising approach to improve productivity and reduce wasted capacity, the take up of Distributed Manufacturing itself has been difficult. One of the issues is a lack of automated mechanisms to match suppliers and buyers. Firms need to spend manual effort to orchestrate matches, which are unlikely to outweigh the cost benefits obtained from a Distributed Manufacturing approach. Another issue has been the monopolization of economic transactions by platform providers, which results in suppliers having to succumb to pressure for reducing prices.
For years, multi-agent systems (MAS) architecture has been considered a possible solution to reducing the above issues associated with the conventional, centralized manufacturing orchestration. MAS offers a way to automatically allocate suppliers of services to buyers, without the associated manual transaction costs. It also allows for decentralized matchmaking, reducing the power of platform providers in suppliers. MAS take up has been slow due to a lack of suitable infrastructure. Ultimately, the missing link has been the application of cutting-edge research in AI and the connection with the blockchain technology that helps us understand the benefits that multi-agent systems can provide within the distributed manufacturing sector.
This collaboration will bridge these gaps, shedding light on the lack of current industry applications available to act as benchmarks to capitalize on the solutions multi-agent systems can provide to the distributing manufacturing sector.
Battery material company Nyobolt raises $10m
Led by IQ Capital with participation from Cambridge Enterprise and Silicon Valley investors, the funding will be used to expand the company globally, build new facilities, and grow the engineering and operational teams.
Nyobolt (formerly CB2Tech) developed out of research at the University of Cambridge led by battery materials expert, Professor Clare Grey, and Dr. Sai Shivareddy. The company is rapidly expanding its global technical and commercial presence, with teams in the UK, the US and Asia, with decades of experience at Tesla, Samsung, Dupont and Dyson.
The company has developed a proprietary process using niobium-based anode materials to create batteries that deliver record high power, ultrafast charge and high energy. The charge and discharge rate capability of Nyobolt batteries, extensively recorded in academic journals, presents a huge opportunity to supercharge the electric revolution. The batteries also address other major challenges facing much existing technology, as they operate within a wide temperature range and are highly durable.