Post by TUM Venture Labs

🧲 From a permanent magnet breakthrough made over 40 years ago, to a startup mapping hundreds of millions of undiscovered materials. alqem's journey has been shaped within our own ecosystem. Every major technological era has been defined by a material: bronze, iron, steel, silicon. Yet today, the magnets powering our electric vehicles, wind turbines, and robots are still built on decades-old science, and nearly 90% of them come from a single country. As export restrictions turn materials supply into a geopolitical flashpoint, one team decided to change the rules of the search itself. That team is alqem, part of our #startup ecosystem, and they've just raised 💰 €8M in pre-seed funding, co-led by UVC Partners and Union Square Ventures, to build an AI-driven engine that discovers and commercializes next-generation materials. Founded by the team behind Alexandria, the world's leading open materials database, alqem is building its discovery engine on two proprietary foundations: a database of predicted materials far larger than anything previously available, and high-quality training datasets for material properties that didn't exist before. In-house synthesis capability closes the loop between prediction and experiment. The engine has already produced a pipeline of rare-earth-free magnet candidates, with predicted performance validated against experimental data, narrowing hundreds of millions of possibilities down to a tractable shortlist. Dr. Hanh Nguyen, CEO of alqem: For the first time, we have a map of the materials universe. Since starting their journey with our Quantum/Semicon Lab they also received support from two other labs: Software & AI / Munich and Chem / Biosystems. The alqem team has had support from across the wider ecosystem and has grown deep roots with UnternehmerTUM, also winning the Ultimate Demo Day 2025. 🏆 Huge congratulations to the founding team: Dr. Hanh Nguyen (CEO), Dr. Tiago Cerqueira (CTO) and Prof. Milan Allan (CSO) Proud to see a team we've supported from the earliest stages take on one of Europe's most strategic industrial challenges: building the materials that will define the next decades of #deeptech and #cleanenergy. 🚀