London-based Polaron, an AI-first materials company building the intelligence layer for the physical world, has raised €6.7 million ($8 million) to expand its engineering team, accelerate deployment of generative design tools, and support customer demand across automotive and energy.
The round was led by Racine2, an impact-focused fund led by Serena and Makesense, with participation from Speedinvest, Futurepresent, and angel investors from the industrial AI ecosystem.
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.”
Spun out from Imperial College London, Polaron was founded in 2023 by CEO Isaac Squires, CTO Steve Kench and Chief Scientist Sam Cooper. The company combines generative AI with deep materials science expertise to accelerate the development of advanced materials.
Polaron states that material performance is determined by the relationship between how a material is made, what it looks like inside, and how it behaves in the real world, across materials ranging from batteries and composites to metals and ceramics. These process–structure–performance relationships drive the critical behaviours of materials, such as ageing, failure, strength, yield, uptime, cost, and more.
The company states that industries have automated how products are made, but understanding the materials still requires manual work, isolated tools and trial and error. Engineers have to figure out how processing choices affect performance, often using bespoke scripts and subjective judgment.
“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 claims to connect process, structure, and performance by training AI models on real microscopy images and measured properties. This allows machines to interpret microstructure, explain why materials behave as they do and help engineers optimise processes.
“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 states that its platform automates material characterisation and helps bring down the significant time requirement for manual analysis to minutes. Most importantly, the platform helps unlock insights that were previously impossible, including three-dimensional reconstructions of materials from two-dimensional images and rapid identification of complex microstructural features.
Using learned process-structure-property relationships, the system explores the design space to identify optimal material configurations and the processing conditions required to achieve them. The company says this capability bridges the gap between laboratory innovation and industrial manufacturability and works across metals, ceramics, polymers and composites.
Polaron claims that its technology is already used by engineers at global manufacturing companies, including EV makers responsible for over a third of the world’s electric vehicle production. One of its applications involved supporting the design of new battery electrodes, which has yielded energy density improvements of more than 10%.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/02/london-based-ai-startup-polaron-raises-e6-7-million-to-build-the-intelligence-layer-for-materials-science/
