The big picture: alqem, a deeptech startup with offices in Munich and Coimbra, has raised €8 million in pre-seed funding. The company aims to develop rare-earth-free magnets, addressing China’s 94% market control in permanent magnets and a 40-year stagnation in magnet chemistry. alqem was started by the team behind Alexandria, an open materials database.
Why it matters:
- Geopolitical risk: Permanent magnets are critical components in electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, and defense systems. China’s near-monopoly and recent export controls pose significant geopolitical and supply chain risks for Western industries.
- Urgent demand: Automakers and defense suppliers in the US and Europe are actively seeking alternatives to rare-earth magnets, which are difficult to source and have seen no major chemical breakthroughs in over four decades.
- Innovation potential: Despite hundreds of millions of possible crystalline compounds, only a fraction have been explored, leaving a vast untapped potential for new material discovery to address critical industrial needs.
How it works:
- AI-driven discovery engine: alqem employs a proprietary discovery engine to systematically explore the materials universe, predicting which of the hundreds of millions of possible crystalline compounds are viable for rare-earth-free magnets.
- Proprietary databases: The company leverages al-mine, a database of predicted stable compounds that excludes rare-earth, toxic, and expensive elements, and al-oracle, a set of material-property training datasets built over several years.
- Lab validation: alqem validates promising candidates in its own lab, claiming to have developed a pipeline of rare-earth-free magnet candidates that have been confirmed with experimental data.
The catch: alqem’s €8 million pre-seed funding is modest compared to competitors like Lila Sciences, which has raised $550 million for a broader AI-for-science platform, or other well-funded rivals such as Periodic Labs and CuspAI. The company’s primary challenge will be to rapidly translate its computational predictions into commercially viable, factory-ready materials, a process that has seen little progress in over forty years, before better-funded competitors can dominate the market for critical new materials.
Key Facts
- Company: alqem
- Amount: €8M
- Round: Pre-seed
- Investor: UVC Partners and Union Square Ventures (co-lead)
- Founders: Hanh Nguyen, Tiago Cerqueira, Milan Allan
- Sector: AI Materials Discovery
- Headquarters: Munich, Germany
