Black-Owned Deep Tech Startup Secures $2.5M To Discover Sustainable Materials

Materials Nexus founder Jonathan Bean has joined the small number of Black people in the UK who have been able to raise over £1 million for their startups.

Reducing the cost of going green

Green technologies, like wind turbines and electric vehicles, hold great promise for a cleaner future. We need to enhance their material components to make them even more effective. 

However, this often involves heavy mining for rare-earth metals and precious metals. Jonathan Bean, a UK-based theoretical physicist from the University of Cambridge, founded Materials Nexus in 2020 to change this.

“The mining and processing of rare-earth materials to build them emits over eight million tonnes of CO2 plus other greenhouse gases in addition to using lots of water and toxic chemicals,” Bean explained. “This will naturally increase as more of us switch to green technologies. 

“Our mission is simple – to discover more sustainable materials which governments and companies can use to build green technologies in a commercially viable way.”

For the past two years, Bean and his team have worked on combining AI and quantum mechanics to reduce the need to conduct slow and costly physical tests to discover new materials.  

This allowed them to build their own datasets and algorithms, accelerating the discovery time to ensure products could be pushed to the market faster.

Securing Funding

The company announced it had closed a £2 million ($2.5 million) seed round led by Ada Ventures alongside MD One Ventures, the University of Cambridge, and investors Andrew MacKay and Jasmin Thomas. 

According to a press release, Bean plans to use the money to scale its commercial and scientific operations.

“He’s a needle in the haystack that we VCs spend years searching for.”

It also hopes to prove the effectiveness of its technology as they find alternatives to materials they are already using in products such as semiconductors and batteries to help innovations like wind turbines and electric car sales more rapidly and sustainably.

After first looking for capital in October 2022, Bean said he got a term sheet within five months.

“He’s a needle in the haystack that we VCs spend years searching for,” said Matt Penneycard, a co-founding partner at Ada Ventures.

“Our strong bet is that Materials Nexus has the potential to play a very significant role in our fight against climate change and be the solution to the damaging addiction to rare earth and unique metal compounds we’ve built.”