Polaron, a materials science intelligence startup, has today announced £6 million in funding. The round was led by Racine2, an impact focused fund led by Serena and Makesense, with co-investment from Speedinvest and Futurepresent, plus angel backing from senior figures across the Industrial AI ecosystem.
Polaron builds an intelligence layer for materials science to address the bottleneck between how materials are made and how they perform. The funding will enable Polaron to expand its engineering team, accelerate rollout of its generative design tools, and support growing customer demand across automotive, energy, and beyond.
Polaron addresses a long-standing challenge in manufacturing where understanding materials relies on manual work, isolated tools, and trial and error. Engineers must connect processing choices to material performance, even though processing determines structure and structure determines performance. Polaron trains models on real microscopy images and measured properties to interpret microstructure, explain material behaviour, and help engineers optimise processes more quickly, reducing extensive manual analysis to minutes.
Polaron was spun out from Imperial College London after seven years of research at the intersection of AI and materials science. Its technology is already used by engineers at global manufacturing leaders, including electric vehicle makers responsible for over a third of the world’s electric vehicle production. In one use case supporting new battery electrode design, Polaron reports energy density improvements exceeding 10 percent.
