Foundation Models for Materials Discovery: Our Investment in Orbital Materials
Advanced materials, from energy storage to chemical catalysts, underpin many of the industries that power our daily lives. As electrification and decarbonization drive major industrial innovation, demand is increasing significantly for new materials that can enhance sustainability, performance and efficiency in industries such as chemicals, energy storage and automotive.
However, designing and commercializing new materials is currently a slow trial-and-error process that has seen limited impact from computer-aided design. This is because traditional computational materials design, based on bottom-up physics simulation, is painstakingly slow — meaning that only a fraction of the millions of possible designs can be evaluated for further experimentation in the wet lab.
Fortunately, innovations in artificial intelligence have led to the emergence of foundation models, which are trained on vast amounts of data and leading to models that can be used across numerous applications. Those foundation models have the potential to enable inverse design, a method of material development that expedites the process by using the specific required properties as an input and generating the new material design as an output. This approach has the potential to revolutionize material development across industries, which is why we are excited to announce Toyota Ventures’ investment in Orbital Materials through our Frontier Fund.
Based in London, England, the company has developed a custom foundation model for designing new materials, and has set up a wet lab in New Jersey to develop a pipeline of new materials for key advanced industrial applications. Co-founded in September 2022 by CEO Jonathan Godwin, chief technology officer James Gin-Pollock, and chief operating officer Dan Miodovnik, Orbital Materials’ team is composed of world-class AI and chemistry experts from companies such as DeepMind, Allen Institute for AI, BASF, Zeochem, and Mosaic Materials.
“Orbital Materials’ 3D foundation model is unlocking one of the holy grails of materials science — the ability to quickly and rationally design materials with specific properties and characteristics, without having to screen a massive search space. We were drawn to the team’s world-class backgrounds in AI and computational chemistry, and are excited about their first applications within clean air, water, and energy.” — Chris Abshire, principal, Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund
The team has trained a 3D foundation model, named LINUS, for crystal structures and small molecules. Instead of screening millions of materials in hopes of finding one with a specific property, LINUS generates a material based on a given property in a single calculation. To do this, the team has developed a new version of the “transformer”, a model typically used for natural language processing, to allow the model to learn the relationships between the 3D structures of materials and their properties. Advanced materials that absorb and catalyze are crucial in various industries such as carbon capture, sustainable fuels, water treatments, biofeedstock upgrades, and battery recycling.
The company has made impressive progress since its founding, having already used LINUS to discover a new molecule used to make catalysts — a process that would normally take over a year. Toyota Ventures is proud to support the Orbital Materials team by participating in the company’s $16 million Series A funding round. David Sokolic, a partner on the Frontier Fund, and Chris Abshire, a principal on the Frontier Fund, drove Toyota Ventures’ participation in the round, which was led by Radical Ventures. Additional investors included Compound VC, Fly VC, Character VC, Flying Fish VC, and Incite Ventures.
