[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.
Why it matters:
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.
The long view:
- Speed is everything when it comes to innovation.
- Companies face rising costs, fierce patent competition, and pressures to develop cleaner, more circular means of doing business.
- Long R&D cycles are no longer an option—especially in critical areas like health, energy, and climate innovation.
What they’re saying:
“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, enabling you to optimize any set of ingredients under any kind of constraints. Solving for slow innovation has turned Atinary into an accelerant across industries.”
“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.
The north star:
The collaboration could help usher in a new era of scientific discovery—where AI and robotics take R&D from bottleneck to breakthrough.
The post Atinary partners with ABB Robotics, others to accelerate R&D with self-driving lab appeared first on AgFunderNews.
