alqem announced that it has raised €8 million in pre-seed funding to scale its AI-driven materials discovery engine. The round was co-led by UVC Partners and Union Square Ventures.
The Munich-based deep-tech startup is building an AI platform to discover and commercialize next-generation materials. The company was founded by the team behind Alexandria, an open materials database used by researchers and companies working on AI-driven materials discovery.
alqem is building its discovery engine on two proprietary foundations. These include a database of predicted materials that the company says is vastly larger than anything previously available to the field, along with high-quality training datasets for material properties that did not previously exist.
The company is also adding in-house synthesis capability to close the loop between prediction and experiment. This approach is designed to compress the path from scientific prediction to industrial application from decades to years or even months.
alqem is initially focused on rare-earth-free magnets, which are critical to electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, and defense systems. The company noted that advanced permanent magnets are heavily concentrated in China, creating supply chain and geopolitical risks.
The company said its discovery engine has already produced a pipeline of rare-earth-free magnet candidates. These candidates have predicted performance validated against experimental data.
alqem’s platform narrows hundreds of millions of theoretical materials possibilities into a tractable shortlist. It also automates experimental data analysis steps that typically take hours, allowing the engine to improve with each iteration.
Beyond its discovery engine, alqem is working to establish a European-led materials supply chain. The company said this supports the development of deep-tech research, engineering, and manufacturing jobs across its Munich and Coimbra operations.
Three technical foundations underpin alqem’s discovery engine. The first is al-mine, a proprietary database of predicted stable crystalline compounds that is deliberately weighted away from rare-earth, toxic, and costly elements.
The second is al-oracle, a set of high-quality, domain-specific training datasets for material properties assembled by the team over several years. Both al-mine and al-oracle build on Alexandria, the open materials database co-built by alqem co-founder and CTO Dr. Tiago Cerqueira and scientific advisor Prof. Miguel Marques.
The third foundation is in-house synthesis and characterization capability. This capability is anchored by co-founder Prof. Milan Allan, Chair of Experimental Physics at LMU Munich.
alqem is collaborating with the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden on next-generation magnetic materials. The collaboration is led by Prof. Claudia Felser, Director of the Institute and Vice President of the Max Planck Society.
The company’s scientific advisors include Prof. Claudia Felser, Prof. Miguel Marques of Ruhr University Bochum, and Michael Viertler, former Senior Partner and Managing Partner Munich at McKinsey. Research partners include LMU Munich, TU Munich, Técnico Lisbon, the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto, and the University of Coimbra.
alqem was founded in 2026 by Dr. Hanh Nguyen, Dr. Tiago Cerqueira, and Prof. Milan Allan. Nguyen is a chemicals and energy executive with over 15 years of experience across McKinsey, Unilever, and OCI Global, while Cerqueira co-developed Alexandria and Allan serves as Chair of Experimental Physics, Quantum Metrology and Sensing at LMU Munich.
The company plans to expand its team across Munich and Coimbra. alqem is also part of the UnternehmerTUM ecosystem.
KEY QUOTES:
“For the first time, we have a map of the materials universe. Not just a few known compounds, but hundreds of millions of possibilities we can now systematically explore and bring to the world. Materials that will make electric vehicles more energy efficient, wind turbines more powerful, and critical supply chains independent from single-country control.”
“We start where the need is greatest, rare-earth-free magnets, a material the world urgently needs and hasn’t been able to replace for decades. But the engine we are building is not limited to one material class.”
Dr. Hanh Nguyen, CEO of alqem
“alqem is a startup with world-class science translated into a company tackling one of Europe’s most strategic industrial challenges. Advanced materials sit at the heart of the technologies that will define the next decades, from clean energy to mobility to defense. alqem has the unique scientific foundation with the entrepreneurial drive to build a category leader in this field.”
Amanda Birkenholz, Principal at UVC Partners
“At USV we have a thesis around AI learning loops for the real world that create proprietary datasets. The alqem.ai team is leveraging their experience with building one of the largest open data sets to now explore innovative materials, starting with magnets. We are excited about their approach.”
Albert Wenger, Partner at Union Square Ventures
“Discovering a genuinely new permanent magnet is one of the hardest problems in materials science. The last real breakthrough came more than forty years ago. What makes alqem’s approach different is that it doesn’t stop at prediction. In our collaboration, we are putting exactly the kind of rare-earth-free candidates the field has been waiting for to the experimental test, and it is the pairing of large-scale computational screening with rigorous synthesis that convinces me this can work.”
Prof. Claudia Felser, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids and Vice President of the Max Planck Society
