PHIN Materials Awarded Federal Funding to Accelerate Catalyst Innovation via AI

We are excited to announce that PHIN Materials has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E to participate in the CATALCHEM-E program.

This partnership aims to solve one of the biggest bottlenecks in clean energy: the decade-long timeline required to develop new industrial catalysts. By using our proprietary AI models, we are building a workflow that compresses 10 years of research into a single year.

“By integrating physics-informed AI with high-throughput experimentation, we are transforming material discovery from a slow, manual process into an agile, digital workflow. This ARPA-E support accelerates our mission by providing proof points that this technology is ready to scale and engineers can advanced materials in months rather than decades,” said Dr. Emil Annevelink, Co-founder and CEO of Physics Inverted Materials.

Our project focuses on connecting PHIN's AI scientist and simulation platform with Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL) MIRAL autonomous laboratory platform and catalyst manufacturing and testing capabilities at Washington University and Lectrolyst. Together, we will identify high-performance catalysts for the production of sustainable fuels and chemicals. Traditionally, discovering a new catalyst is a "needle in a haystack" problem that takes years of trial and error. Instead, we use AI to pinpoint the most promising chemical compositions before they are even tested in a lab, then we use automation to verify them instantly. This allows us to scale clean energy solutions at the speed required to meet global climate goals, ensuring American leadership in the next generation of industrial manufacturing.

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