Radical AI raises $55M seed led by RTX Ventures to build AI-powered materials science R&D facility

you go to Eric Newcomer, although obviously there's a lot of great benefits that you get when you go to Eric Newcomer. But our next guest is here in the studio. I'm seeing green light. We're good. Very good. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? What's going on? Up, gents. How's it going? Good to finally be on.

Big fans. Fantastic. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you. And you've have some uh uh pretty big news today. Break it down. What you got? Yeah. Rig raised our seed round 55 million. There we go. I I personally love when seed I love to see a seed round get into the uh double digit figures. Yeah.

High double digits. I think they all should be some hopefully you're the start of a new a new wave. But what what is is this the third largest third largest seed round in in in New York history? Is that right? That's what we're tracking. That's right.

On our end, at least on the equity only side and uh we're pulling some data where everyone else does. But yeah, we feel excited about it and we feel really good on on being able to build continue to build in New York City. So the equity only side, I was going to ask I asked Jordy about that.

I was like, "Okay, $55 million seed. Is this is this 80% debt? Is there some like crazy GPU credit thing going on here? People get kind of funky with the numbers these days. This seems like real dollars. Who is writing $55 million seed checks these days? Yeah. So, round was led by RTX ventures arm.

So, the corporate venture arm there a lot of interest in what we've been working on and and they led the round. We had great partners come into that round. Nvidia's venture arm and ventures any next uh Infinite Capital Ali Corp where who did our preede and also participated in this round as well.

uh as well as kind of a bunch of other investors with inside of that. So super excited about the support we have. It's interesting we have a balance of both financial VCs as well as corporate strategics in this round as well. And look, we work in material science.

I'm sure we'll get into this in more detail, but I think they really see where materials and science at large is going with AI. And this is why they're starting to look into tech and and startups because that's where the innovation truly is, especially in a space like the physical world and material science.

So really interesting mix and we are super proud of the syndicate we put together. So that's awesome. Uh backstory on yourself then the time at Al Alley Corp. Yeah. How how this company was was created would be would be awesome. Yeah, absolutely. So going back a couple years, I'm a scientist by training.

I was working in grad school uh at Rice. I was working on these things called noramorphic computing chips which they try to replace the vonoyoman bottleneck uh inside CPUs. A lot of big words back to back. Yeah.

So we pretty much try to connect memory and CPU and not lose the latency and the energy that go inside a chip. So I was working on this technology except it was going nowhere because it's academic research and academic research doesn't scale into the real world. So I was super frustrated.

So ended up getting a fellowship at the Army Research Lab. I go there.

problem atl right and the army wants to see things come and move into the services that they can actually use but it's still really early technology readiness levels like two three four still in that fundamental area so I was getting frustrated so I said okay I'm going to start a company and then I realized I didn't know anything about starting a company and I didn't actually know what I wanted to do uh and so I bumped into Kevin Ryan in New York I reached out to him cold cold cold emailed him actually and said, "Hey, if you're not investing in material science, you're not investing in the future.

" He was like, "Okay, I've been an investor for 30 years. That's a bold claim, but sure. " What are what are some of the big names that that Ali Cororp has done? They did MongoDB all the way through business insider. Crazy range. Yeah. Wide range. And Ali Corp's unique, right?

Ali Corp both incubates companies inhouse, kind of where Radical really got its roots, and I can talk about that, but also invest at the early stage as well. anywhere from 1 to 5 million in in the early stage side seed sometimes you know an early series A.

So they have this interesting ability to go and dive into a space and if they find a company they love and they want to invest in they will invest and and that's what we did there and if there isn't one they'll actually look to incubate that company in house and so it's a really nice uh a way to play into a new market that you want to see innovation in but just can't find something that's there.

When did the preede happen? uh uh was it a year ago more? Yeah, about a year ago or a little bit over March of 24. So me and uh one of my other co-founders, Jorge, both at Ali Corp. Jorge is uh deep software guy, startup guy through and through. Uh only done starts his entire career and he's looking into AI, right?

Who wasn't? All of us were. But we were super frustrated. We kept seeing rappers on top of models and we were thinking like this can't actually be it, right? Like is this the pinnacle of innovation? like the the new tech wave is going to be rappers and we knew that wasn't it.

So we we spent like months reading a bunch of papers inside AI. We were convinced the technology was incredible but there had to be a space that was better.

And being a material scientist I thought well materials are quite large right the most important industries in the world automotive aerospace manufacturing defense climate energy semiconductors the most important industries in the world are all direct result from materials. So why don't we look into there?

So, we start reading into the space. We dive in deep and we bump into this uh gentleman named Herd Cedar. Longtime academic. He's at Berkeley. He's got an H index of 182 or something like that. And he had done two things specifically. He'd helped set up the materials project from the MGI.

So, this AI for materials early sector inside the US. And then he built a robotic lab. It's called the AAB. It's at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab right now. And it's fully autonomous. does 55 experiments a day. So we're like, we we got to go see this thing.

So we fly out to Berkeley, we we get dinner with her and we pitch him on, look, someone's got to build the future of material science and it needs to be a full stack vertically integrated approach.

There's no other way to drive value and us together really aligned uh opinion around what it should look like and and formed the company and went from there. So it's 10 million in preede from Alcior and got started and went to big big numbers big numbers all the way up. Yeah.

My question is like why not just do series A10 million, series B 55 million? Uh what does a $55 million seed round like what what's what message are you sending? Obviously it's like superlative so you can get headlines around it.

Is that the value that you just stand out or is it you specifically want to because I imagine that if I just walked around your office it's going to feel like a series B company that's raised $55 million. Um, so like what like Yeah.

Like like what are you actually saying to folks when you say, "Oh, I run a seedstage company. " versus, "Oh, I run a company that's raised, you know, tens of millions of dollars. " These are two different aesthetics. They definitely are. I feel like we still feel pretty early.

Uh, I don't know what series B's are looking like yet today. I'm not there yet. We We like being super lean. We are really, honestly, crazy about our culture. We think culture is one of the most important things you can do at an early stage company. And we're really really rigorous on who we bring in and why.

And so we actually keep the team quite light. We will be growing with the round. Of course, it goes without saying, but we really deeply believe in the ability to challenge everything that exists today. Ask the question why about everything?

Why do these things have what what's the got a got a lot of money on the on the balance sheet. Sorry. And sorry, your internet I think is a little rough. We got to with the 55 million up the you guys deserve fiber now. Let's get it. Let's get it in there. Um, but what uh what's the use of funds?

What does success look like over the next 18 months? Sounds like you guys are super ambitious, but but how do you start proving out what you can do? Yeah. So, we got to scale the team. Want to bring in big talent on the side of AI as well as material science and and the automation side.

There's a lot of interdisiplinary approaches that we take. One part-time AI researcher. Yeah. Fractional fractional fractional AI researcher. It's going to be good. 20 hours a week. Yeah. No, we're not not doing any of that here. I'm sure you can integration.

Um, and then two, we're going to build the most advanced materials R&D facility in the world that have multiple different materials lines. It'll do hundreds of thousands of experiments per year. And all of that data is the missing data set that really exists inside the AI for material space today.

So if we can capture all of that. So are you are you rebuilding the the kind of robotics lab that your co-founder had at Berkeley in order to execute that many experiments we do. Yeah. So we kind of we amped it up in a way. His was a very academic approach to it.

Had to work within inside academic constraints was very specific on a research problem.

Ours is much more automated in that we are doing real active learning on the data analysis and capture and then bringing that back into the AI engine and then can really be made into a platform where we can actually take that software and robotic system approach that we have and use it in other material systems.

So we can actually be multi-systembased inside the products that we're trying to solve for. So that's kind of a big differentiation between where his was and where ours is going to be today. Awesome. Awesome. All right. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining. Very, very exciting. And congratulations.

Congratulations. Thank you guys. Thanks for having me on and we'll be in touch. We will talk to you soon. Cheers. Good luck out there. In the meantime, we will tell you about Adio customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. Let's go to Swix.

He says, "Break this down. I'll be right back. " Sure. So Swix friend of the show says a lot of people are poo pooing the chat GPT agent launch which we covered on the show yesterday. We had folks from OpenAI on and we also had uh Dan Shipper from every on the on the show to to break down how he's using chat GPT agent.

I was impressed with the OpenAI folks. I thought they uh explained a lot of how this works and Dan Shippers were like his uh you know third-party analysis of how he's using the tool sounded very promising. We haven't had a chance to test it here on the show, but uh I'm excited for it. And Swix breaks it down.

He says uh people are poo poo pooing chat GPT agent as just a better harness, but they're not reading closely enough.