[Disclosure: AgFunderNews' parent company AgFunder is an investor in Atinary.]
Deeptech startup Atinary is teaming up with ABB Robotics to build a self-driving laboratory in Boston, alongside Mettler-Toledo and Agilent, both key players in lab technology.
By combining Atinary's no-code AI platform with ABB's robotics, the partnership is creating a physical, automated research environment that enables chemists to experiment faster, more cheaply and potentially even remotely.
Across industries, R&D is costly and slow -- often the biggest barrier to innovation, even when AI helps out.
Atinary claims its Self-Driving Labs (SDLabs) let chemists deploy easy-to-use machine learning (no code required) to discover and optimize new chemical combinations up to 100x faster.
Pairing Atinary's AI with ABB's robotics could supercharge materials discovery for health, environment, energy, and food -- critical to human and planetary health, not to mention businesses' bottom lines.
"Atinary's AI and self-driving labs technology, combined with ABB robotics' state of the art equipment, software and laboratory automation expertise, will enable more autonomous and versatile robots to accelerate new materials research," says Jose Manuel Collados, global product line manager, ABB Service Robotics.
"This paradigm shift is advancing the development of solutions to address the world's greatest challenges in health, energy, climate, and food," adds Hermann Tribukait, cofounder and CEO, Atinary.
"An example of accelerating disruption is Atinary," notes Manuel Gonzalez, managing partner at AgFunder. "The limiting factor is not idea creation, it is time -- specifically the pace of R&D. Testing new materials, new ideas in the experimentation field is slow, expensive, and iterative. Atinary changes that. They built an AI-driven, self-optimizing R&D engine using Bayesian Optimization models and are now adding a GenAI agent. This shrinks material/idea discovery time from years to weeks. Anywhere you need to optimize a set of ingredients of any kind under a set of constraints. Solving for slow innovation has turned Atinary into an accelerant across industries."