Albert Invent lands $55M Series B led by TCV at $340M valuation

About 30% of all scientific experiments are "duplicate" and wasteful, says Nick Talken, CEO and cofounder of Albert Invent. Most of them, Forbes reports, are still recorded in paper notebooks and spreadsheets, which makes them difficult to track over time.

That is the pitch behind the Oakland startup's $55 million Series B, which TCV led at a reported $340 million valuation. Delta-v Capital, Socium Ventures, HighSage Ventures, Coral Capital and Legion VC joined as new investors, alongside existing backers Coatue, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Index Ventures and Applied Ventures.

Albert says its chemistry-native model, Valence, is "45x more accurate than general-purpose AI at retrieving the correct answers to scientific queries." The company trained its models on 15 million chemical structures and the entire corpus of chemical patent data, described as "pretty much the entire public information space around chemistry." The customer list reads like a chemicals rolodex: BASF, Henkel, Clorox, Kenvue, AkzoNobel, Avient, Chemours and Nouryon.

Talken saw the problem up close as the former head of digital R&D at Henkel before cofounding Albert in 2022. "Enterprise AI for chemistry has to be built from the ontology up," he said. "The language, data, workflows, and decisions for R&D are deeply specialized."

The company reports project creation grew 26x year over year, scientists on the platform rose 6x across 44 countries, and workflow creation grew 4x. The $340 million figure is attributed to one unnamed source cited by Forbes, so treat it as reported rather than confirmed. Albert's round lands in a crowded cycle: 423 raises have crossed our AI funding tracker in the last 90 days.