Why I Started Orbital Materials

I was working at DeepMind the day we released AlphaFold. That day we had a feeling that a turning point for human health had been reached as a result of AI - a new age of cures for some of our most pressing diseases. And incredibly, this 50 year old problem had been solved by a comparatively small team, some of whom had no biology background - a testament to the huge leverage AI brings to human creativity and intelligence. The rate of progress in AI has only increased since then. It is, without a doubt, the most powerful technology of the 21st century. 

My personal guiding belief is that the most powerful technologies in the world should be applied to the most important problems we face. At the time AlphaFold was released I had just started work on applying large scale machine learning to what I believe is the foundational physical science problem of the 21st century, known as “Materials Science”.

Materials Science encompasses the design of new batteries, materials that capture CO2, the chemistries that can produce sustainable, carbon neutral fuels and the processes by which we convert biomass into natural chemicals. Versions of these products power the world economy but require dramatic innovation - by itself, the global market for aviation fuel is projected to be ~$650bn in 2030, and we need a sustainable and, crucially, affordable alternative. 

The progress over the past few years in AI for materials has been breathtaking, as we and the wider community started taking the principles from models like AlphaFold, ChatGPT & Stable Diffusion and adapting them for our uses. It’s often felt to me that decades of progress was happening in a matter of months. And it seemed almost impossible to me that incumbent companies were going to leverage AI with the speed they needed to - we’ve heard stories of large chemistry companies with a single computational materials scientist.

It’s this trajectory, and the urgency of the problems we face, that led me and the rest of the founding team to start Orbital Materials - an AI-first chemistry & materials company, building upon the incredible work in generative AI over the past 24 months.

I’m incredibly excited that other people share this vision, including the extraordinary individuals who have joined us since starting late last year - people who have done foundational work on AI for language, generative models, and AI for chemistry, but also people who have spent decades at the coal face of bringing these products to market. I think this is a testament to the ambition of what we're building. And, last week, we had our first public coverage in Bloomberg.

You’ll find us in the lab, discovering industry-defining technologies in areas like Clean Air (e.g. CO2 capture), Clean Energy & Natural Chemicals (e.g. Sustainable Aviation Fuel) and Clean Water (e.g. removing forever chemicals from our drinking water). Please reach out if you'd like to learn more.