A startup called Dunia Innovations GmbH, which is pioneering artificial intelligence-powered materials discovery, has announced its ambitious goal to “change the world” after closing on $11.5 million in funding today.

The round was led by Elaia and Redalpine, and saw participation from EIC, Pace Ventures, Kindred Capital, Deep Science Ventures, Anglo American and a number of angel investors.

Dunia wants to help decarbonize the chemical industry. To do that, it’s focused on accelerating the important process of advanced materials discovery, with a particular emphasis on what it calls “power-to-x electrocatalysts.” These catalysts are crucial for green hydrogen and ammonia generation, as well as the conversion of carbon dioxide into more advanced chemical products, which will form the basis of more eco-friendly fuels, chemicals, fertilizers, plastics and textiles in the future.

The startup says it has created a proprietary “self-driving lab” that combines science-based AI algorithms with advanced chemical-robotic workflows and quantum chemistry-derived material representations. It’s a novel combination that provides Dunia with a significant advantage over alternative machine learning-based approaches to material discovery, and it believes it can rapidly accelerate these processes.

The startup explains that its technology will address the urgent need for sustainable innovation in chemical materials discovery, which is a trillion-dollar market opportunity. Catalysts drive 90% of today’s chemical processes, playing a key role in the global energy transition to more environmentally friendly fuels.

As a result, the global market for electrochemical technologies is forecast to reach $1.5 trillion by 2050. That forecast is based on the fact that conventional innovation cycles in materials discovery last for decades, held back by a slow and inefficient “design, make, test, analyze” process.

Dunia thinks it can reduce the time it takes to identify and manufacture new catalysts to just three years, accelerating efforts to transition to more sustainable chemicals and materials. Its physics-informed AI integrates principles of physics and empirical verification into its algorithms, providing what it says is a robust, insightful approach to problem-solving. It combines these AI algorithms with an advanced robotic platform that’s designed to rapidly execute electrochemical experiments and capture data to ensure traceable, reproducible results.

“By combining machine learning with chemical robotics, we can iterate faster and generate high-quality data, drastically cutting down the time needed to discover new materials,” said Dunia co-founder Alexander Hammer.

Dunia says it has validated its approach in a proof-of-concept, where it accelerated the formulation of electrocatalyst ink, outperforming human researchers in both speed and performance over a span of two years. Having proven its capabilities, Dunia will use the funding from today’s round to make its platform available to researchers globally.

Redalpine’s founding partner Michael Sidler said humanity’s unquenchable desire for energy and its reliance on petrochemicals means there’s an urgent need to accelerate the discovery of more sustainable fuels and chemicals.

“We need radical disruption to the existing R&D processes to create novel catalyzing agents for the efficient synthesis of such fuels,” he said. “Dunia’s AI-driven lab approach is the foundation of the discovery of these world-changing catalysts.”

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