By partnering on the discovery of environmentally friendly high-performance materials, Kebotix, a technology platform company for new chemicals and materials, and Koura (formerly Mexichem Fluor), a leading global provider of products and solutions across multiple industrial sectors, are integrally aligning a current project with United Nations Sustainability Goals around climate change and energy, and other global environmental efforts.
While details of their collaboration are being kept confidential for now, the two companies are sharing their excitement over not only engaging in corporate citizenship tied to researching new materials for yet-announced applications, but for dramatically reducing the time required to come up with new chemicals. Central to this increase in the speed of discovery is Kebotix’s artificial intelligence and virtual screening that combines probabilistic Machine Learning (ML) and engineering expertise.
Kebotix, which has developed the world’s first self-driving lab for materials discovery powered by AI and robotics, evaluated a library of several thousand potential material candidates that would ultimately lead to new products. From there, a set of probabilistic ML models was generated and validated with measurements provided by Koura. The Kebotix team used the validated models to predict functional properties for the large set of molecules, narrowing down the library to a couple hundred of lead candidates. The next steps are proprietary, but the enthusiasm isn’t.
“What we are doing together is magic – disrupting how R&D is done while reducing the cost and increasing the speed to bring products to market faster,” said Kebotix CEO Jill S. Becker. Christoph Kreisbeck, Kebotix chief product officer, added, “We built a database that our AI brain then learned from, saving our partner considerable time and money.”
As for the happy customer, Koura said Kebotix mirrors its own company’s 66-year-old dedication to operational excellence, relentless innovation and a results-driven culture.
“Partnering with Kebotix to discover new high-performance materials has been a success from the start,” said Dr. Bob Low, Koura technology director. “Project execution has been exemplary with every milestone being hit to-date among other achievements. Kebotix does not behave like the start-up it is. We look forward to continuing our relationship and building on the momentum to transform and accelerate our product development processes.”
Research’s Beneficial By-Product
Not lost on Kebotix and Koura is the opportunity to help solve one of the world’s most urgent problems by accelerating the exploration, discovery, use and production of new molecules and materials. Two of the UN Sustainability Goals, in the areas of energy and climate change, are being addressed in their materials discovery work.
“One goal is to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impact, and another is to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy,” Becker said. “Our work with Koura adheres to both goals set by the UN. This is by design per our corporate mission to change the paradigm of chemicals and materials discovery through AI and automation technology.”
Kebotix (www.kebotix.com) is building the materials company of the 21st century to usher in a new age of high-speed innovation using artificial intelligence and robotic automation. Based on technology developed at Harvard University, Kebotix has built the world’s first self-driving lab for materials discovery powered by AI and robotics. Kebotix, founded in 2017, is accelerating the exploration, discovery, use and production of new molecules and materials that can solve some of the world’s most urgent problems.
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