Polymerize, a material informatics platform for R&D in chemical companies headquartered in Singapore, has announced that it has raised US$ 4.2 million in Series A funding led by Elevation Capital. The round also saw participation from InfoEdge Ventures who had previously invested in their Seed round.
Founded in 2020 by Kunal Sandeep and Dr. Abhijit Salvekar (Ph.D), Polymerize is a SaaS platform that helps R&D teams in chemical companies simplify the process of formulation development and data-management. The core value proposition of the platform is to reduce the overall R&D costs and accelerate companies’ time-to-market for their new products. Polymerize’s platform enables R&D teams to collaborate across different geographies and effectively manage all of their past & current experimental data, design new experiments and get AI based recommendations for new formulations or alternative ingredients with desired properties (such as elasticity, hardness, viscosity etc.).
There is an ever increasing demand for high performance materials to support advancements across industries such as electric mobility, circular economy, aviation, energy, healthcare etc. And this demand pushes the companies to innovate & develop materials faster. For instance, earlier, IC Engine cars needed materials to be flame retardant, high temperature resistant, oil resistant etc. Today, Electric cars need materials to be electrically insulated, lightweight, durable, inexpensive. A critical need to switch from metal to composites.
Thus, the material companies need to identify the right formulations which will meet their objectives. The current process of formulation development is iterative, manual, time and cost intensive and can take anywhere from several months to a few years. Polymerize, with their software aims to shorten this development time significantly (by up to 50%), achieve R&D cost savings of upto 40% and generate new formulations with better outcomes.
Abhijit and Kunal together are a great mix of industry expertise and business skills. Abhijit is a material scientist, who has worked as Product Researcher with the Japanese materials giant AGC Inc. (erstwhile Asahi Glass) and thus brings in domain & technical expertise. Kunal, on the other hand, has been 2x founder in the past along with stints at KPMG and Subex, which allows him to play a pivotal part in scaling the product & the business. They have also built a stellar leadership team consisting of individuals who have worked at places such as Schlumberger, Whatfix etc.
Dr. Abhijit Salvekar, Co-founder, Polymerize said, “Both Kunal & I were struck by the inefficiencies in R&D for materials formulation. Not only are the current methods inefficient and don’t leverage data from previous iterations of experiments, they also run the risk of missing out on the formulation of materials with unique properties. Polymerize’s deep tech solution not only allows companies to save on time and money, it also ensures the best possible end-level output.”
Deepak Gaur, Partner, Elevation Capital said, “Kunal and Abhijit have unlocked the power of ML for the chemical and polymer industries which are facing the ever increasing market demand for innovative materials. We strongly believe that Polymerize’s material informatics platform will help the customers leapfrog into the digital era.”