Citrine Informatics, the chemicals and materials artificial intelligence (AI) platform, today announced it has closed a $7.6 million Series A led by Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, DCVC (Data Collective), and Prelude Ventures. Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures and XSeed Capital also joined the round. Citrine combines AI with the world's largest materials database to help bring products to market faster. The company will use the funding to accelerate its early successes with Fortune 1000 customers.

"The next generation of advanced materials takes far too long to develop today," said Scott Brady, partner at Innovation Endeavors. "Citrine is bringing together the domain experts, data and AI specifically optimized to take advantage of known relationships in chemistry and physics to revolutionize the speed at which materials can be used in the market."

Factories are getting smarter, yet the chemicals and alloys that produce cutting-edge products remain largely unchanged. The consequence of this mismatch is painful delay and cost to manufacturers. According to the National Academy of Sciences, new products can take two decades or more to go from initial design to market, with the intermediate step of developing new materials often taking the longest. Citrine dramatically reduces the time and cost of this process by providing a data-driven approach to predict and optimize materials behavior.

"DCVC is excited to back companies like Citrine that unite proprietary data at massive scale, deeply defensible algorithms, and the ability to transform huge vertical industries where the founders are experts," said Matt Ocko, a managing partner and co-founder of DCVC. "We believe Citrine's AI-powered materials innovation will drive the next wave of explosive innovation and growth in product development - with markedly lower cost for both manufacturer and customer alike."

Citrine's unique algorithms unify decades of high quality experimental data both from sources internal to companies and from academic sources and journals. This enriched data then feeds powerful AI systems that can create new materials in record time. As a result, Citrine's predictive intelligence technology has helped organizations hit overall R&D and manufacturing milestones in less than 50% of the time originally forecast.

"AME Cloud seeks companies building infrastructure at every level of the data stack," added Jerry Yang, founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo. "Citrine's unique approach brings together public and private data sources to create a materials 'brain' in the cloud and an opportunity to fundamentally change how advanced products are developed."

Citrine was founded by a team of seasoned materials scientists. The management team includes Mr. Greg Mulholland, CEO, Dr. Bryce Meredig, Chief Science Officer, and Dr. Kyle Michel, Chief Technology Officer. Scott Brady from Innovation Endeavors and Mark Cupta from Prelude Ventures have joined the Citrine Board.

"Materials development has traditionally lagged behind other elements of product innovation," said Greg Mulholland, CEO of Citrine. "Our AI technology enables our customers to launch faster than the competition as well as gain significant market share and margin. We're excited to put this funding to work to transform the product development cycle for even more Citrine customers."

To learn more about Materials Science, check out the timely resources provided by the Center of Excellence on Advanced Materials created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

About Citrine Informatics

Citrine Informatics accelerates the product development cycle by combining access to the world's largest materials database with AI designed by materials scientists. Citrine is backed by leading investors including, Innovation Endeavors, DCVC (Data Collective), Prelude Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, XSeed Capital, Ulu Ventures, and Morado Ventures. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, CA. Follow us at @Citrine_io.