Albert has raised $55 million in Series B funding to expand its chemistry-native artificial intelligence platform for research and development organizations in the chemicals and materials industries. The round was led by TCV, with participation from new investors Delta-v Capital, Socium Ventures, HighSage Ventures, Coral Capital, and Legion VC. Existing investors Coatue, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Index Ventures, and Applied Ventures also participated. Albert plans to use the funding to expand its chemistry-native AI capabilities and help customers shorten product development cycles.
The Oakland-based company has developed Albert OS, an operating system built specifically for chemistry and materials science R&D. The platform combines specialized AI with enterprise security and governance features including zero data retention, fine-grained access controls, and reasoning audit trails.
Albert also announced results from its chemistry-native model, Valence. According to company research using its FormBench chemistry benchmark, Valence was 45 times more accurate than general-purpose AI models at retrieving correct answers to scientific queries. Albert said the model was trained to distinguish chemical composition and function while analyzing text.
The platform is used by companies including AkzoNobel, Avient, BASF, Chemours, Clorox, Henkel, Kenvue, and Nouryon. Its Ask Albert product allows scientists to interact with research information using natural language while orchestrating tools, models, and agents. Applications include surfacing institutional knowledge, proposing formulation candidates, designing experiments, and conducting complex data analysis.
Albert reported significant adoption growth over the past year. Project creation increased 26-fold year over year, while the number of scientists using Albert OS increased sixfold across 44 countries. Workflow creation increased fourfold as customers brought more R&D processes onto the platform.
The company said Ask Albert has evolved during the past six months from an AI search assistant into a broader R&D partner capable of reasoning across information contained within Albert OS.
KEY QUOTES:
“Enterprise AI for chemistry has to be built from the ontology up; the language, data, workflows, and decisions for R&D are deeply specialized. Because our team comes from the chemical industry, we’ve built Albert around that reality, pairing a scientific ontology with chemistry-native AI in a way that is tailored for each customer. This funding supports our vision of enabling customers to build a world model of their unique science, one that is grounded in their real experimental data.”
Nick Talken, CEO And Co-Founder Of Albert
“R&D in chemistry still runs largely on spreadsheets and institutional memory. Albert turns decades of lab data into faster discovery, and it represents what we think the future of vertical AI should look like.”
Morgan Gerlack, Partner At TCV
“We are proud of what we’ve accomplished together with Albert and are even more excited about the next steps on our shared roadmap. As a result of the partnership, we have increased R&D’s ability to be interconnected across a common data platform, enabling the acceleration of how we develop new products for our consumers.”
David Lutness, Head Of R&D Digital Capabilities At Kenvue
