Albert Raises $55M to Scale Chemistry-Native AI
Albert, developer of the first chemistry-native AI operating system for R&D, announced a $55 million Series B funding.
The Series B funding is led by TCV with participation from new investors Delta-V Capital, Socium Ventures, HighSage Ventures, Coral Capital, and Legion VC. They are joined by existing investors Coatue, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Index Ventures, and Applied Ventures. The new funding will be used to expand Albert’s chemistry-native AI capabilities, shortening development cycles and reducing time to market for the everyday products used by billions of people.
As companies race to adapt to shifting safety and regulatory requirements, supply chain disruptions, and customer expectations for faster timelines, leveraging AI for product development is becoming increasingly critical. Albert was built specifically for the complexity of chemistry and materials science, combining chemistry-native AI with the security, governance, and scale required by global enterprises, including zero data retention, fine grained access controls, and reasoning audit trails.
General-purpose models consistently fail to support specialized workflows in highly sensitive industries like legal, finance, and science. In enterprise R&D, scientists need highly specific AI capable of distinguishing between formulations, materials, processes, and experimental conditions that can look nearly identical in language but behave very differently in practice. Albert created a benchmark for formulation chemistry called “FormBench,” which sets a new global standard for evaluating AI in this context.
Albert also announced the industry-defining success of its chemistry-native model “Valence” which new research shows is 45x more accurate than general-purpose AI at retrieving the correct answers to scientific queries. Valence achieves this improved performance because it was trained to discriminate chemical composition and function while reading text, the way an experienced chemist would.
“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,” said Nick Talken, CEO and co-founder of Albert.
“R&D in chemistry still runs largely on spreadsheets and institutional memory,” said Morgan Gerlak, Partner, TCV. “Albert turns decades of lab data into faster discovery, and it represents what we think the future of vertical AI should look like.”
Albert’s chemistry-native AI brings together the scientific ontology, intelligence, integrations, and regulatory compliance required to support R&D across large organizations, with partners such as AkzoNobel, Avient, BASF, Chemours, Clorox, Henkel, Kenvue, and Nouryon. Scientists can interact with natural language, and Ask Albert orchestrates a sophisticated harness of the tools, agents, and models to accelerate invention: surfacing institutional knowledge so teams don’t repeat work, suggesting formulation candidates and designing experiments to shorten development cycles, and running complex data analysis to accelerate decisions.
“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,” said David Lutness, Head of R&D Digital Capabilities at Kenvue, maker of consumer health products like Zyrtec, Neutrogena, and Listerine.
"In a global organization like ours, the challenge is never a lack of data, it's connecting it. Ask Albert lets our teams query everything in one place, from raw materials to notebook entries, instead of hunting across systems. We're still early, but it's clear this is going to reshape how we manage knowledge across R&D,” said Milena Rosso-Vasic, Program Manager at one of the world’s largest paint manufacturers, AkzoNobel.
Over the past year, Albert has continued to expand across enterprise chemistry and materials R&D: Project creation has grown 26x year over year as organizations deploy Albert OS as shared infrastructure across their R&D functions. The user base has also multiplied, with 6x more scientists on Albert OS year over year, spanning 44 countries. This growth in adoption also includes increasingly diverse chemistry, with 4x more workflow creation year over year as more teams bring different R&D processes onto the platform. Albert’s product capabilities have expanded just as rapidly: in six months, Ask Albert evolved from an AI search assistant to a full R&D partner that reasons across all of Albert OS.
