Anyone involved in polymer development knows the road is long, expensive, and full of trial-and-error efforts in the attempt to come up with new and better formulations. Georgia Tech startup Matmerize is making dramatic changes to that process.

The company’s flagship PolymRize™ product can end the expensive and time-consuming cycles typical in materials development. Rather than months or years of trying different formulations based on intuition and past-experience, clients using the PolymRize platform have reported converging to new formulations in a quarter to one-third of the usual time and expense, while also gaining the ability to structure and manage their own data.

By integrating the vast polymer informatics intellectual property (IP) created in Dr. Rampi Ramprasad’s Georgia Tech lab with advanced data science methods, Matmerize is transforming and accelerating industrial materials development at scale. Their unique product has positioned them as the leader in polymer informatics.

The technology: A polymer informatics software platform to accelerate materials development
The versatile PolymRize software is a user-friendly, cloud-based solution that simplifies intelligent materials design. Using proprietary Matmerize polymer data and/or custom user-supplied data, the system virtually screens potential new materials based on the user’s target properties and performance requirements. It then predicts polymer characteristics to determine those with the greatest promise. Only those chosen candidates are then produced in a lab for testing by the clients, which saves considerable development time and money.

The PolymRize platform is completely secure and easily accessible via web browser or application program interfaces (APIs) for chemists and process engineers. All user interactions with the PolymRize software are encrypted and not visible to anyone outside of the client company (including the Matmerize team). Custom models built using client data are deployed for that client’s exclusive use, and the data are destroyed once the model is built.

“Companies are now beginning to realize the value and opportunity presented by leveraging materials data,” Dr. Ramprasad said. “Matmerize seeks to take the next logical and transformative step. Rather than competing with or duplicating the internal activities of chemists, process engineers, and computational materials scientists, PolymRize offers complementarity, efficiency, and support to accelerate rational materials optimization or discovery. Matmerize software solutions are designed to be powerful and transformative digital assistants to R&D scientists and engineers.”

The licensee: Leveraging data to advance cost-effective and intelligent materials design
Dr. Rampi Ramprasad is the CEO and co-founder of Matmerize and has been a professor of materials science and engineering at Georgia Tech since 2018. He launched the startup out of his Georgia Tech lab in 2019. The exclusively licensed polymer informatics IP created in his lab forms the basis for the Matmerize PolymRize product.

“We had a lot of support getting Matmerize off the ground and into the marketplace so quickly,” Ramprasad says. “I’m especially appreciative of Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering, plus Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing and VentureLab. The Georgia Research Alliance also played a pivotal role with right-time, early-stage investment and advice.”

Since its inception, Matmerize has pushed the boundaries of generative algorithms for polymer and process design, learning algorithms that harness the power of data regardless of the dataset size, and approached that enable clients to plan their next round of experiments in a rational manner. This has resulted in a doubling of revenues year over year for the past two years, with a similar trend projected for the next two years. Thanks to traction with clients in several segments, ranging from polymer/resin suppliers to sustainable consumer goods manufacturers to electronics, Matmerize plans to expand staffing in several critical areas.

The impact of technology transfer: Significantly reducing development time and cost
Research and development of new polymers using the traditional trial-and-error approach costs companies up to $10 billion per year. Matmerize’s technology can significantly lower those costs, while also accelerating time to market. Clients using PolymRize software have reported time and expense reductions of 25% to 33% when working on new polymer formulations.

In addition to these savings, the PolymRize platform is capable of advancing the design of materials to be more environmentally friendly, safer, or that can be transformative for both society and the marketplace. Tools are available to screen and design polymers and formulations that are both functional and biodegradable, for example.

The PolymRize software complements the activities of chemists, process engineers, and computational materials scientists, increasing efficiency and significantly accelerating materials optimization or discovery.

The future 
By eliminating expensive and long trial-and-error cycles, Matmerize seeks to define a new industry standard for cost-effective and accelerated development of polymer materials and formulation development.

The PolymRize platform firmly fills the void as the first product to provide analytics solutions by transforming data into prediction and design models specifically geared towards polymers, molecules, and formulations. The company is now envisioning other products to generate, curate/capture, and manage data. Ultimately, Matmerize envisions its software products on the desks of every polymer manufacturer, supplier, and end-user.

PolymRize™ is a registered trademark of Matmerize, Inc.