Polaron Raises $8M To Build The ‘Intelligence Layer For Materials Science’

The funding will help expand its engineering team, accelerate the rollout of generative design tools, and meet growing customer demand across the automotive and energy sectors.

The round was led by Racine2, an impact-focused fund backed by Serena and Makesense, with additional participation from Speedinvest, Futurepresent, and angel investors from the industrial AI sector.

Isaac Squires, CEO and co-founder of Polaron, said, “For 150 years, industry has used machines to shape materials. Now, we are teaching machines to understand them. Polaron is building an intelligence layer powered by the world’s materials data for faster discovery, better design and a new generation of advanced materials.”

Polaron, a spinout from Imperial College London, was founded in 2023 by CEO Isaac Squires, CTO Steve Kench, and Chief Scientist Sam Cooper. The company combines generative AI with advanced materials science to accelerate the development and optimisation of next-generation materials.

Polaron explains that material performance depends on how materials are produced, their internal structure, and how they perform in real-world conditions. These process-structure-performance relationships influence key properties such as durability strength, efficiency, cost and reliability across materials including batteries composites metals and ceramics.

Read Also - Paris-Based HealthTech Hublo Receives €40M Reinvestment From Revaia

The company notes that while manufacturing processes have become highly automated, understanding material behaviour still relies heavily on manual analysis, fragmented tools and trial-and-error approaches. Engineers often must evaluate how production decisions affect performance using custom scripts and subjective assessments.

“‍At the heart of this challenge is a fundamental scientific relationship: processing determines structure and structure determines performance. The arrangement of grains, pores, phases and defects inside a material governs properties such as strength, lifetime, and failure. This structure is not abstract. It is directly observable under the microscope, where rich microstructural images capture the physical fingerprint of how a material was made and how it will behave – supporting cleaner, more efficient manufacturing at scale,” Polaron mentioned in the press release.

The company states that it links process, structure, and performance by training AI models using real microscopy images and measured material properties. This approach enables machines to analyse microstructures, explain material behaviour, and assist engineers in optimising manufacturing processes and performance outcomes.

“What impressed us about Polaron is its focus on the point where materials innovation often breaks down: translating scientific insight into manufacturable reality. By grounding AI in real microstructural data and industrial constraints, Polaron is building a platform that can accelerate how advanced materials move from research into production,” said Florian Obst Principal investor with Speedinvest’s AI and Infra investment team.

The company says its platform automates material characterisation, reducing manual analysis that typically takes days or weeks to just minutes. It also enables new insights, such as creating three-dimensional material reconstructions from two-dimensional images and quickly identifying complex microstructural patterns.

By applying learned process–structure–property relationships, the platform explores design possibilities to determine optimal material configurations and the processing conditions required to produce them. The company states this helps bridge the gap between laboratory research and large-scale manufacturing across metals, ceramics, polymers, and composites.

Polaron reports that its technology is already being used by engineers at global manufacturing companies, including electric vehicle producers responsible for more than one-third of global EV production. In one example, its platform supported the development of new battery electrodes, delivering energy density improvements exceeding 10%.