Nanoforge AI, New Materials Developer, Raises KRW 14.6 Billion in Seed Funding

Material development that once took 10 years
Cut to "about one month" with core AI technology

Nanoforge AI, a startup that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to shorten the development time for new materials, announced on Friday that it had raised KRW 14.6 billion in seed funding.

The investment was led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment, with DSC Investment, the Korea Development Bank (KDB), EcoPro Partners and others participating as new investors. Existing investors FuturePlay and Mashup Ventures also made follow-on investments. The funding brings Nanoforge AI's total investment raised to more than KRW 15 billion.

Founded last year, Nanoforge AI uses AI to predict the properties of materials and design new ones. Until now, finding materials with the desired performance has required testing and validating a large number of candidate substances. The company aims to replace or reduce these steps with AI, cutting the time and cost needed to develop materials.

The company's core technology uses AI to predict the forces and energies acting between atoms. It calculates, at the atomic level, factors such as how much a material expands when heated and how readily ions move inside a battery. The company has developed technologies for these predictions and is also developing technology to predict electronic structures, which determine properties such as electrical conductivity.

The company says this approach can identify promising material candidates in advance and reduce the number of actual experiments. Its long-term goal is to shorten material development timelines from more than 10 years to about one month.

The company is also pursuing collaboration with industry. According to the company, it is working with secondary-battery materials company EcoPro BM to develop next-generation materials and has also collaborated with major domestic companies, including Samsung Electronics. EcoPro Partners' participation in this investment has extended the technology collaboration to investment as well.

The company plans to use the funds to develop electronic-structure prediction technology and build a robot-based autonomous laboratory. It aims to improve the accuracy and speed of new-material development by establishing a system in which robots synthesize materials and the resulting analysis data is fed back into AI training. The company also aims to secure intellectual property (IP) related to new materials in major industries such as semiconductors and secondary batteries.

To strengthen its research capabilities, the company appointed Yoo Seunghwa, a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), as a technical adviser. Together with Professor Park Chanyoung of KAIST's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the company has established an advisory framework to support the development of AI technologies for materials and their industrial application.

"We will accelerate materials innovation and industrial development by building a materials-development system in which each new discovery comes faster as experimental data accumulates," said Kim Donghyun, CEO of Nanoforge AI.

"Nanoforge AI is an exceptional team capable of completely changing the way materials are developed," said Jo Jinhwan, a director at Mirae Asset Venture Investment, which led the investment. "We expect the company to transform the existing trial-and-error-based approach to materials research and development by combining atomic-level AI prediction technology with a robotic autonomous laboratory."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.