6 July 2026

MCQST-affiliated startup alqem raises €8M to scale AI-driven materials discovery

Munich-based deep-tech startup alqem has raised €8 million in pre-seed funding, co-led by UVC Partners and Union Square Ventures, to scale its AI-driven engine for discovering next-generation materials. Among alqem's co-founders is Prof. Milan Allan, Chair of Experimental Physics at LMU Munich and a member of MCQST, who serves as the company's CSO and heads its in-house synthesis and characterization work.

alqem is building its discovery engine on two proprietary foundations: a database of predicted materials vastly larger than anything previously available to the field, and high-quality training datasets for material properties that did not exist before. To close the loop between prediction and experiment, the company also brings in-house synthesis capability.

Undiscovered materials powering the next technological era

Bronze, iron, steel, silicon: every major technological era has been defined by a material breakthrough. Yet only a small fraction of theoretically possible crystalline compounds have ever been synthesized. Hundreds of millions of possibilities remain undiscovered. At the same time, the materials we rely on are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Advanced permanent magnets – critical to electric vehicles, wind turbines, robotics, and defense systems – are roughly 90% produced in China, and recent export restrictions have turned materials supply into a geopolitical flashpoint.

"For the first time, we have a map of the materials universe. Not just a few known compounds, but hundreds of millions of possibilities we can now systematically explore and bring to the world. Materials that could make electric vehicles more energy efficient, wind turbines more powerful, and critical supply chains independent from single-country control," says Dr. Hanh Nguyen, CEO, alqem.

The last breakthrough in permanent magnets came more than 40 years ago!

The search for new materials is no longer an odyssey. It is a directed journey. alqem's mission is to compress the path from scientific prediction to industrial application from decades to years. Or even months. The discovery engine has already produced a pipeline of rare-earth-free magnet candidates, with predicted performance validated against experimental data. By narrowing hundreds of millions of possibilities down to a tractable shortlist and automating experimental data analysis steps that typically take hours, the engine gets more accurate with every iteration.

"We start where the need is greatest – rare-earth-free magnets, a material the world urgently needs and hasn't been able to replace for decades. But the engine we are building is not limited to one material class," says Dr. Nguyen.

Beyond the discovery engine, alqem is working to establish a European-led supply chain for materials. This work supports the build-out of DeepTech research, engineering, and manufacturing jobs across its Munich and Coimbra operations.

From Alexandria to alqem: Scientific excellence and technology

Three technical foundations underpin the discovery engine. The first is al-mine: a proprietary database of predicted stable crystalline compounds, deliberately weighted away from rare-earth, toxic, and costly elements. The second is al-oracle: a set of high-quality, domain-specific training datasets for material properties, assembled by the team over the years. Both build on Alexandria, the open materials database co-built by alqem co-founder Dr. Tiago Cerqueira (CTO) and scientific advisor Prof. Miguel Marques – proof that this team has been defining the scientific standard in this field long before alqem existed. The third foundation is in-house synthesis and characterization capability, anchored by co-founder Prof. Milan Allan, Chair of Experimental Physics at LMU Munich.

Collaborations and supporters

alqem's work is supported by a close collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden on next-generation magnetic materials. The collaboration is led by Prof. Claudia Felser, Director of the Institute and Vice President of the Max Planck Society. She serves as scientific advisor to alqem alongside Prof. Miguel Marques (Ruhr University Bochum) and Michael Viertler, former Senior Partner and Managing Partner Munich at McKinsey. Research partners include LMU Munich, TU Munich, Técnico Lisbon, University of Porto, and the University of Coimbra.

Read the full press release on alqem.ai