Turning Expert Knowledge into a Growth Engine for Chemical Firms

Farid Mirmohseni, Co-Founder and CEO, Kimia

© Kimia

Most of what a chemical company knows was never written down. It sits with a handful of chemists and technical service engineers, often one expert for every fifty people who need what they know. This is also why most corporate AI projects disappoint: a 2025 MIT study found that 95% of enterprise AI initiatives deliver no measurable return, not because the models are weak, but because the systems never capture what the organization actually knows and never learn from it. Kimia, founded in 2023, was built to close exactly that gap: capturing and codifying expert knowledge and turning it into answers the whole commercial organization can use. CHEManager spoke with co-founder and CEO Farid Mirmohseni.

CHEManager: Where did the idea for Kimia come from?

Farid Mirmohseni: From my father, really. He is a chemist, and he built a business making polymer coatings, adhesives and composites, which I worked in for nine years. Every difficult technical question ended up on his desk, which grade survives a cure schedule, why a bond that held on one substrate let go on the next, and he was very good at it. The trouble was that he was one person, so when he was travelling, customers waited. I put that down to us being a family business, until I started working with companies a thousand times the size and found the same three or four names holding everything up.

Give us a concrete example. What does a hard problem look like in your customers‘ world?

F. Mirmohseni: Say a formulator is bonding polypropylene to aluminium on a packaging line, needs open time under thirty seconds, and cannot move on the customer’s VOC limit. The data sheet gives a viscosity of 3,000 mPa·s and says the product suits flexible packaging lamination, and all of that is information. Knowing that on untreated polypropylene the bond starts letting go above 80 °C is knowledge, and it sits in somebody’s head, not a document. Knowing it rules the product out for this line is intelligence, and that last step has always been a person.