Analysis
Albert Invent, which markets its platform as Albert, raised a $55 million Series B led by TCV, with new backers Delta-v Capital, Socium Ventures, HighSage Ventures, Coral Capital and Legion VC joining existing investors Coatue, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Index Ventures and Applied Ventures. According to MarketMinute, the Oakland, California company's funding history includes:
- Series A (Dec. 2024): $22.5 million, led by Coatue
- Growth round (2025): led by J.P. Morgan Private Capital's Growth Equity Partners, with Coatue and TCV participating
- Combined total before this round: more than $45 million
What does Albert Invent's platform actually do?
Albert sells a "chemistry-native" AI operating system for industrial R&D: Albert OS captures lab experiments and structures the data, Ask Albert is a natural-language assistant for querying it, and Valence is the company's own model, trained specifically on chemistry rather than general text. The company also runs FormBench, a formulation-chemistry benchmark it built itself, and claims Valence is 45 times more accurate than general-purpose AI models at retrieving correct answers to scientific queries -- a figure from Albert's own research, not an outside evaluation. CEO and co-founder Nick Talken said "enterprise AI for chemistry has to be built from the ontology up," arguing that spreadsheets and institutional memory still run most industrial R&D.
The company counts AkzoNobel, Avient, BASF, Chemours, Clorox, Henkel, Kenvue and Nouryon as customers, and says project creation on its platform is up 26x year over year, with the number of scientists using it up 6x across 44 countries. Kenvue's head of R&D digital capabilities, David Lutness, said the partnership has connected the company's R&D teams on a common data platform; AkzoNobel program manager Milena Rosso-Vasic said the tool lets teams query raw materials data and notebook entries in one place, though she described the rollout as still early.
Who else is selling AI for chemistry R&D?
Albert is competing in a field that includes materials-informatics platforms like Citrine Informatics and Uncountable, both of which pitch AI tools for accelerating industrial R&D, though neither has disclosed funding at Albert's scale. TCV partner Morgan Gerlack framed the opportunity bluntly: chemistry R&D "still runs largely on spreadsheets and institutional memory," and Albert's bet is that turning lab data into a structured, queryable asset is worth paying for at enterprise scale. The company has not disclosed a valuation for this round.
