Today, we are pleased to announce Delta-v's investment in Albert, the chemistry-native AI operating system for R&D. Delta-v is participating in the company's $55 million Series B. The new capital will support continued investment in Albert's AI capabilities to help shorten development cycles and time to market for products used every day by billions of people.
The physical world runs on chemistry: the coatings on our homes, the adhesives in our cars, the ingredients in the products we put on our skin. Most of the science behind them still runs on spreadsheets and institutional memory. We believe Albert is building the system that changes that.
Chemistry Needs Its Own AI
Chemical and materials companies sit on decades of experimental data, much of it scattered across paper notebooks, spreadsheets, and legacy systems. That history is one of their most valuable assets, yet it is hard to search and nearly impossible for AI to learn from.
Shifting safety and regulatory requirements, supply-chain disruptions, and customer demands for faster timelines are forcing manufacturers to reformulate constantly. Using AI in product development is quickly becoming a requirement, not an experiment.
However, general-purpose models fall short. Formulations, materials, and experimental conditions can look nearly identical in language yet behave very differently in practice. Just as the legal industry has moved toward domain-specific AI, we believe chemistry needs AI built from the domain up. Albert’s chemistry-native model is trained to read text the way an experienced chemist would, and research shows Albert’s model is 45x more accurate than general-purpose AI at retrieving correct answers to scientific queries.
The Chemistry-Native AI Operating System
Albert brings together the scientific ontology, intelligence, integrations, and regulatory compliance that R&D teams need across large organizations:
Albert OS. The system of record that captures experiments and structures a company's data, from paper notebooks to live lab work, deployed as shared infrastructure across R&D functions.
Ask Albert. Scientists work in natural language while Ask Albert orchestrates tools, agents, and models to surface institutional knowledge, suggest formulation candidates, design experiments, and run complex data analysis.
Breakthrough. AI built on a foundation of more than 15 million molecular structures, then trained on each customer's own experiments to predict properties, optimize formulations, and design experiments.
All of it is enterprise-grade by design: zero data retention, fine-grained access controls, and reasoning audit trails give global enterprises the security and governance required to trust AI with their most sensitive IP.
Why Albert
Built by chemists. Albert began as an idea in a trailer lab in Ken Kisner's backyard, where Ken and Nick Talken built Molecule Corp., a 3D printing materials company acquired by Henkel in 2019. Frustrated by outdated lab tools, they built their own platform, which became Albert.
Marquee enterprise customers. Albert supports R&D at some of the world's largest chemical and consumer companies, including AkzoNobel, Avient, BASF, Chemours, Clorox, Henkel, Kenvue, and Nouryon. AkzoNobel runs its global Digital Workbench on Albert OS for more than 2,000 R&D professionals across 70 labs in over 20 countries. Kenvue, the maker of Zyrtec, Neutrogena, and Listerine, is digitizing hundreds of R&D processes across its global brands on Albert.
Measurable results. Applied Molecules said Breakthrough cut projects from roughly three months to as little as two days, and Albert reports that its leading customers have seen a 50% increase in overall speed to market and a 25% increase in chemist productivity.
Rapid adoption. Over the past year, Albert reports project creation on the platform grew 26x, the number of scientists on Albert OS grew 6x, and workflow creation grew 4x as more teams brought different R&D processes onto the platform. Scientists in 44 countries now use Albert.
Our Partnership
Albert represents what we believe the future of vertical AI looks like, and we are excited to support the company in its next phase of growth. We look forward to working with Nick, Ken, and the entire Albert team as they build the chemistry-native AI operating system.
The information contained herein is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any securities or investment products. Certain statements may be forward-looking in nature and are subject to risks and uncertainties; actual results may differ materially. References to customer experiences are anecdotal and should not be construed as endorsements or investment advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
