[Each month, discover the profile of an 🌍CS Alumni impact entrepreneur in collaboration with CentraleSupélec Alumni]
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What if AI could transform the lives of industrial chemists? And what if it allowed them to amplify and thus accelerate the discovery of new materials to decarbonize industrial processes? This is the ambition of the startup Entalpic, positioned at the intersection of three major contemporary challenges: industrial, climate, and technological.
At its helm is Alexandre Duval, a passionate and committed young entrepreneur. Reconciling AI and societal utility has always been a guiding principle for him. “From very early on, I wanted my work to be useful to society, which, for example, led me to work on Explainable AI, or how to understand algorithmic decisions to avoid discrimination linked to data biases, or even those of current society,” says this graduate of the MSc in Artificial Intelligence from CentraleSupélec, who also holds a PhD in machine learning obtained at the CVN laboratory of CentraleSupélec and Inria.
Now CSO (Chief Scientific Officer) of the young Parisian startup, Alexandre Duval was perfectly poised to thrive in the Deeptech world. During his doctorate, he flew to Quebec, where he joined the laboratories of Prof. Yoshua Bengio, AI pioneer and 2018 Turing Award laureate, and David Rolnick, at Mila, the renowned Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. It was there that he began to take an interest in how AI can accelerate the discovery of new materials capable of reducing industrial carbon impact, particularly in the manufacturing of cement, fertilizers, and hydrogen.
"Inspired by the recent publication of Open Catalyst, a major open-source research program led by Meta AI and Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU), I focused on catalysts, which are used for chemical reactions," he explains. The stakes are enormous; ammonia production alone accounts for about 3% of global carbon emissions, and cement production nearly 7%.
"We wanted to join a stimulating ecosystem, with many opportunities for collaboration and an accelerator that shares our vision for science and takes a long-term view. We were won over."
A rapid 8.5 million euro fundraising round
Gradually, he made it his focus, "as if it were obvious: I felt it was my responsibility to accelerate research in this field." In late 2023, shortly before defending his thesis, Alexandre Duval headed to Cambridge (UK), recruited for an internship by Amazon to work on LLMs. At the same time, a decisive meeting took place, or rather discussions, with Victor Schmidt, a "fellow PhD student" at Mila, and Mathieu Galtier, an alumnus of Mines de Paris with an Inria-ENS-Oxford doctorate, then Chief Data & Platform Officer at Owkin. "The three of us agreed to put our skills to work for a climate solution," he summarizes.
Things then moved very quickly. In February 2024, he defended his thesis. In the spring, the trio reached an agreement, Alexandre Duval left Amazon, then the three co-founders managed to raise 8.5 million euros, and in May, the company's articles of association were filed. It will be called Entalpic, a nod to the thermodynamic concept of enthalpy.
The young company has since been working on developing generative and predictive algorithms at the core of a sort of library-matrix. Fed with extensive data, physicochemical laws, and scientific studies, this platform generates and tests new hypothetical materials by leveraging graph neural networks (GNNs), active learning methods, and LLMs.
Moving beyond the 'needle in a haystack' era
"Our platform will help chemists, who are increasingly being asked by their management to find new catalysts," explains Alexandre Duval. "But until now, they had no choice but to rely on their intuition to explore an infinite space of possibilities, a quest that often amounts to searching for a needle in a haystack and is expensive." Entalpic could thus revolutionize the approach. "Our ambition is to co-develop these discovered catalysts with industrial partners, in order to retain intellectual property or at least share it. This is why we plan to have our own laboratory in the future to synthesize them."
Meanwhile, Entalpic needs to grow quickly and well. Its first seed funding round is enabling it to kickstart its momentum, with the recruitment of around twenty experts in both AI and physical chemistry. “A multidisciplinary team of highly qualified professionals, with strong ambitions for diversity and parity,” states Alexandre Duval. To ensure its successful launch, Entalpic chose to join CentraleSupélec’s 21st accelerator, located within Station F. “We wanted to join a stimulating ecosystem, with many opportunities for networking and an accelerator that shares our vision of science and takes a long-term view. We were impressed.” Now, the challenge is to win over the industrial sector.
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To learn more about Entalpic or contact them, follow this link to their website!
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