Chemix, an innovative Gen AI-powered battery developer, closed its $20M Series A
Chemix, an industry leader in battery development, leverages its proprietary MIX R&D platform to automate large swaths of its processes. The $20M Series A round led by Ibex Investors, allows Chemix to scale operations to meet customer demand and venture into more specialized segments.
Chemix leverages its proprietary battery-specific MIX R&D platform to autonomously test cells, and screen unique electrolyte formulations and electrode pairs to develop custom batteries for the diverse electric vehicle (EV) verticals. Chemix's proprietary platform was trained using high-quality, carefully curated data, entirely gathered from physical experimentation. The training data enables Chemix's deep neural network to autonomously generate novel and improved materials and cell designs for scientists and engineers to go over. The high-quality dataset allowed Chemix to innovate using generative AI, something previously thought possible only in fields with widely available structured data such as drug discovery, healthcare, and insurance. In under 3 years, Chemix has tested 10,000 commercial battery cells, screened 4,000 electrolyte formulations and 2,000 electrode pairs, and collected 4.5 million cycles worth of data.
Ibex Investors led the $20 million Series A funding round, which included participation from Mayfield Fund, Berkeley SkyDeck, Urban Innovation Fund, as well as strategic investors BNP Paribas Solar Impulse Venture Fund (SIVF), KDDI Open Innovation Fund III (KDDI CVC), and Porsche Ventures. Chemix plans to grow its teams focused on AI/ML, software and battery development, and sales and marketing. The funding round will also enable Chemix to scale operations to meet growing customer demand and to venture into specialized EV segments such as e-motorcycles, utility e-motorbikes, and commercial EVs. This includes fulfilling a commercial agreement with a cutting-edge EV manufacturer in which Chemix committed to supplying 2-GWh-worth of batteries for the manufacturer's premium off-road SUV and pack product lines.
More generally, Chemix's Series A comes at an ideal moment for the company to profit from two emergent opportunities. The first one comes from the fact that EVs are projected to make up over 50% of car sales by 2030. As a result, battery demand will rapidly increase soon, especially for premium EV applications. Chemix has developed electrolytes enabling commercial Li-ion cells to achieve 1,500 cycles at high temps or 2,000 fast-charge cycles, 5x conventional levels. They've also created Co/Ni-free batteries with 20% higher energy density than mainstream LFP chemistry, matching their safety and lasting 1,500 cycles under heavy testing. Third parties in established EV OEMs have validated the results for large pouch-format cells, with evaluations for high-volume, high-capacity prismatic-format cells expected soon.
On the other hand, Chemix is poised to profit from the golden opportunity arising in the battery industry by integrating generative AI across its value chain. The battery industry is in a perfect position to optimize everything from material discovery and optimizing costs to accelerating manufacturing output and driving increasing quality. Chemix has already got a headstart in most of these areas, boosting investor confidence. As Jeff Peters of Ibex Investors stated, “Chemix’s unique GenAI-powered platform approach to designing and optimizing bespoke batteries for each EV vertical is precisely what automakers need to produce highly differentiated, cost-competitive vehicles. And, they are delivering today.”
