Radical AI Lands $55 million To Apply AI To Materials Science

When the founder of Radical AI reached out to AlleyCorp’s Kevin Ryan, he made a pointed argument: material science was being overlooked in the race toward artificial intelligence. Alongside co-founder Jorge, he had grown disillusioned with the dominant trend of building interface layers on top of large models. They were looking for something more foundational. “We kept seeing wrappers on top of foundation models and thought, is this really it?” he recalled. “That can’t be the pinnacle of innovation.”

The duo spent months reading AI research, convinced the technology had potential far beyond its current uses. What they found was an opportunity at the intersection of AI and the physical world, specifically in materials science. That focus became the foundation of Radical AI, which this month announced a $55 million seed round led by RTX Ventures, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture arm), AlleyCorp, Eni, Infinite Capital, and others.

The company is focused on developing an AI-native, vertically integrated platform for materials discovery bringing together computation, experimentation, and manufacturing into a single system. Instead of treating a material’s digital blueprint, physical synthesis, and real-world performance as separate workflows, Radical aims to merge them into what it describes as a continuous stream of scientific intelligence.

“Materials are quite large,” Joseph Krause said during a podcast conversation. “The most important spaces in the world like automotive, aerospace, defense, climate, energy, semiconductors are all a direct result of material.”