Elaia
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.