Dunia secured $11.5M to accelerate the discovery of promising catalysts

Dunia Innovations GmbH recently closed a successful $11.5 million funding round co-led by Elaia and redalpine, with the support from additional investors EIC, Pace Ventures, Kindred Capital, Deep Science Ventures, Anglo American and angel investors who are industry experts.

Dunia was co-founded in 2022 by Alexander Hammer, Ahmed Ismail, and Marcus Tze-Kiat Ng with a mission to develop a Catalyst Acceleration Platform (CAP) which would break through the current limitations to the discovery of new materials, with a focus on promising electrocatalysts for the green energy industry. Dunia's platform begins by leveraging machine learning to find promising catalytic candidates according to specified constraints.

Then, the startup's automated robotic laboratory expedites the experimental design and the testing process to unearth insights that could lead to breakthroughs once they pass human validation. Since the laboratory methods wouldn't require idealized methods such as miniaturization or massive parallelism, the emerging catalyst discovery and testing methods are expected to be easily scalable, first to pilot programs, and then to industry-scale production.

Adequate electrocatalysts would accelerate the capture and conversion of carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons that could potentially be used as carbon-neutral fuels. Ammonia, which serves as the basis for the fertilizers that are used to grow about half of the world's crops, has a notably high environmental impact. Breakthroughs in catalysis discovery could yield more sustainable alternative routes to ammonia production that do not emit as many greenhouse gases as traditional methods.