Albert Raises $55 Million Series B to Scale Chemistry-Native AI for R&D

Funding Round and Investors

Albert, a developer of a chemistry-native AI operating system for research and development, announced on October 13, 2026 that it has raised $55 million in Series B funding. The round was led by TCV, with participation from new investors Delta-v Capital, Socium Ventures, HighSage Ventures, Coral Capital, and Legion VC. Existing investors Coatue, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Index Ventures, and Applied Ventures, LLC also joined the round.

The company said the new funding will be used to expand its chemistry-native AI capabilities, with the goal of shortening development cycles and reducing time to market for everyday products. Albert built its platform specifically for the complexity of chemistry and materials science, combining specialized AI with enterprise security features such as zero data retention, fine grained access controls, and reasoning audit trails. The company argues that general-purpose models consistently fail to support specialized workflows in highly sensitive industries like legal, finance, and science.

Valence Model Outperforms General-Purpose AI

The funding announcement coincides with new research on FormBench, a benchmark for formulation chemistry that Albert created to evaluate AI systems in this context. According to the research, Albert's chemistry-native model Valence is 45 times more accurate than general-purpose AI at retrieving the correct answers to scientific queries. The company said Valence achieves this performance because it was trained to discriminate chemical composition and function while reading text, the way an experienced chemist would.

In enterprise R&D, scientists need highly specific AI capable of distinguishing between formulations, materials, processes, and experimental conditions that can look nearly identical in language but behave very differently in practice. Nick Talken, CEO and co-founder of Albert, said enterprise AI for chemistry has to be built from the ontology up, and that the funding supports the company's vision of enabling customers to build a world model of their unique science grounded in real experimental data.

Enterprise Adoption Grows Rapidly

Albert's platform is used by organizations including AkzoNobel, Avient, BASF, Chemours, Clorox, Henkel, Kenvue, and Nouryon. Scientists interact with the system through natural language, with Ask Albert orchestrating tools, agents, and models to surface institutional knowledge, suggest formulation candidates, design experiments, and run complex data analysis. The company said Ask Albert evolved from an AI search assistant into a full R&D partner that reasons across all of Albert OS within six months.

Over the past year, project creation on Albert OS grew 26 times year over year, and the scientist user base grew 6 times year over year, spanning 44 countries. Workflow creation increased 4 times year over year as more teams bring different R&D processes onto the platform. TCV partner Morgan Gerlack said R&D in chemistry still runs largely on spreadsheets and institutional memory, and that Albert represents what the future of vertical AI should look like. Albert Invent Corp. is based in Oakland, California.

Sources: Yahoo Finance · Forbes