Paris-based AI startup creates homegrown, sustainable and safer alternatives to critical materials such as rare earths, reducing dependence on imports and strengthening industrial sovereignty.
- The round is led by Alven, with participation from Bpifrance through its Digital Venture fund, as well as historical investors Contrarian Ventures and Emblem, taking total funding to $14 million.
- The firm combines proprietary AI, automated lab synthesis and self-learning characterisation to cut discovery from years to weeks and scale production rapidly.
- Altrove has already achieved first-of-a-kind technical milestones – including rare-earth-free, cobalt-free magnetic materials for high-performance motors and non-toxic, lead-free compounds for sensors and actuators.
- Altrove has secured 12+ partnerships with industry giants across auto, energy and heavy industry to deploy AI-designed materials at scale, with the first products live within 2 years.
Paris, France – October 2025 – Altrove, a Paris-based deeptech startup developing sustainable, AI-designed alternatives to critical materials, today announces it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Alven, with support from Contrarian Ventures, Bpifrance through its Digital Venture fund and Emblem.
Pre-existing investors in Altrove include Entrepreneurs First, and notable angels including Thomas Clozel (Owkin), Julien Chaumond (Hugging Face), Thomas Plantenga (Vinted) and Michal Valko (former principal engineer at Meta). This new funding follows Altrove’s $4 million pre-seed in July 2024 and brings total capital raised to $14 million.
The new capital will be used to scale Altrove’s automated synthesis and characterisation laboratories, recruit additional AI and materials science talent, and push its first breakthrough materials to market at industrial scale. Altrove aims to reach kilo-scale production of AI-designed materials, moving rapidly from grams to industrially relevant volumes, within the next two years.
AI invented alternatives to critical materials
Altrove exists to tackle one of the West’s most urgent industrial and climate challenges: how to achieve net-zero goals while ensuring geopolitical autonomy and economic competitiveness. The company develops homegrown, sustainable substitutes for critical materials, starting with those containing rare-earth elements (REEs), essential for electric vehicles, wind turbines and advanced electronics.
By bridging the gap between AI materials prediction and real-world industrial production, Altrove creates new materials that can be manufactured at scale – strengthening resilience and reducing dependence on Chinese and other overexposed international supply chains.
Global dependence on hostile, global powers
Europe currently imports nearly 100% of its lithium and nearly all of its potassium, with lithium demand projected to grow 18-fold by 2030 and 60-fold by 2050.
Meanwhile China controls over 90% of the global rare-earth supply chain and in late 2023 banned the export of key processing technologies. The OECD forecasts that global materials demand will more than double to 167 billion tonnes by 2060, making dependence on critical raw materials a strategic risk comparable to yesterday’s dependence on oil.
“Western nations cannot af ord to be dependent on imports for the very materials that power electrification,” said Thibaud Martin, co-founder and CEO of Altrove. “Recycling is necessary but not sufficient. We need entirely new classes of materials – designed, validated and scaled using AI – that deliver ecological, cost-efficient and resilient supply chains. Strengthening our industrial sovereignty is no longer optional; it is key to protecting climate goals, competitiveness and national security.”
Unlike AI materials projects that stop at identifying hypothetical compounds, Altrove finds the optimal recipe to manufacture alternative materials at-scale. Its proprietary AI models work in tandem with owned, automated lab synthesis and self-learning characterisation, creating a continuous feedback loop that enables up to 100-times faster discovery than traditional R&D and delivers validated results within weeks instead of years.
“Our technology ensures that our AI-designed materials consume the resources we want them to consume, without dependence on other nations’ resources.” said Dr Joonatan Laulainen, co-founder and CTO. “Our AI acts as a scientist – designing and executing experiments without human intervention – so we can develop new materials faster, cheaper and at the scale industry requires.”
Technology milestones and first-of-a-kind achievements:
Altrove has already demonstrated that its platform moves beyond theory to practice, delivering first-of-a-kind results such as:
- Rare-earth-free magnetic materials for high-performance motors, including high-temperature, cobalt-free formulations, reducing reliance on both rare earths and cobalt- metals that are expensive, reliant on child labour and geopolitically risky to source.
- Non-toxic, lead-free materials for sensors and actuators, providing sustainable alternatives to traditional lead-based compounds used in both pre-electric and electric applications.
- Compelling computational discoveries now validated in the lab: Altrove’s AI predictions have already advanced to experimental testing with a number of major equipment manufacturers, with the first physical prototype due in the coming months.
- Proven performance parity with a critical imported material in laboratory tests.
Commercial traction
Building on these technical breakthroughs, Altrove is already in active discussions with key industrial operators across sectors such as automotive, electronics and energy – signing over a dozen deals to date with major players. These early conversations aim to translate its AI-designed materials into large-scale production partnerships, paving the way for deployment in strategic supply chains.
“We were impressed by Altrove’s pragmatic approach to solving an engineering problem: starting with a clearly identified problem at an industrial partner’s company and working backwards to finding the right material”, said Bartosz Jakubowski, partner at Alven. “We believe that customer centricity paired with AI and an agile lab workflow is a winning recipe in an industry that is usually dominated by pure scale and slow innovation”.
“Altrove is a standout example of deep-tech ambition matched with execution,” said Rokas Peciulaitis, Managing Partner at Contrarian Ventures. “From day one, the team engaged hundreds of component developers to understand the most pressing bottlenecks in critical materials. They’ve now proven they can go beyond theory, using AI and automated characterisation to produce industrially relevant compounds at unprecedented speed. Altrove is creating exactly the kind of sovereign capability the West needs to accelerate its energy transition.”
“Deeptech innovation is vital for Europe and the West’s industrial and ecological sovereignty,” said Joy Boustani, Investment Director at Bpifrance. “Altrove’s approach – combining advanced AI, automated synthesis and self-learning characterisation – of ers a breakthrough path to produce the next generation of critical materials. Supporting Altrove aligns perfectly with our mission to help homegrown technologies scale and secure strategic value chains for the energy transition.”
Altrove’s work is driven by an exceptional team of AI researchers and materials scientists with backgrounds from Cambridge, MIT and Ecole Polytechnique. Their combined expertise in artificial intelligence and materials science enables the company to move rapidly from computational discovery to real-world industrialisation.
About Altrove
Altrove is a Paris-based AI startup creating improved alternatives to critical materials.
By combining advanced AI with automated synthesis and proprietary self-learning characterisation, Altrove delivers validated, manufacturable new materials that improve supply security, cost efficiency and environmental impact. Founded in 2024 by repeat entrepreneur Thibaud Martin (CEO) and Dr Joonatan Laulainen (CTO), Altrove is headquartered in Paris, France.
Learn more at https://www.altrove.ai/
Media contact:
Harry Ashcroft, Perseid PR
harry@perseidpr.com