Uncountable Looks Towards AI and ML to Reinvent R&D

Industrial R&D is facing a reckoning. Innovation cycles remain painfully slow, due in no small part to a reliance on fragmented systems like spreadsheets and lab notebooks. This is despite $2.5 trillion spent globally on research and development annually. Uncountable, a cloud-based platform built for scientific R&D, is helping enterprises unify their experimental data, accelerate innovation cycles, and finally bring AI into the lab.

Founded in 2016 by MIT alumni Noel Hollingsworth and Will Tashman, along with Stanford’s Jason Hirshman, Uncountable has become a vital infrastructure layer for over 120 enterprise R&D teams, from battery makers and cosmetics giants to food tech startups and pharmaceutical developers. This month, Uncountable raised a $27 million Series A round led by Sageview Capital, signaling its next phase of growth, and a validation of its mission:

“Our goal internally is, ‘Can we make R&D more efficient by a factor of 10?’” Hollingsworth told MIT News. “Can we imagine a world where instead of getting the Tesla battery that’s going to come out in 2032, you get it next year?”

Hollingsworth and Tashman met as basketball teammates at MIT, where they developed their startup ambitions. Hollingsworth, who went on to work in sports analytics, and Hirshman, a ML specialist from Stanford, joined forces with Tashman, a materials scientist and former Apple engineer, to tackle a challenge too often overlooked: the broken state of scientific data management.