The spinout has been launched under a partnership model with funding from BASF subsidiary Chemovator in a pre-seed round led by Creator Fund.
The company is using chemical processing techniques to build up large sets of data on chemical reactions, which it will use to train machine learning models to predict the optimal ways to manufacture high-value chemicals.
This could make chemical production more sustainable by helping shift from toxic to benign materials, minimising waste, and reducing energy use. It is also expected to reduce the costs of setting up and running manufacturing facilities, and make supply chains more resilient.
An aim of SOLVE is to optimise a manufacturer’s choice of solvents.
“Solvents often improve reactions but are not in the final product, so they're inherently wasteful and are subject to increasingly heavy regulation,” Dr Linden Schrecker, SOLVE CEO and founder said in a statement. “Even in the last decade, we've seen the number of viable solvents drop, with many commonly used solvents being banned. We can provide clients with extra flexibility to vary how they manufacture a product.”
According to Imperial, industrial chemists currently often use a combination of intuition and trial-and-error to find the best manufacturing processes, but SOLVE aims to offer a more efficient alternative.
Dr Schrecker said: “Chemistry needs to become more data driven. Once you do an experiment, the data should be stored in detail so you can make use of it later. In future there will still be room for creativity by scientists, but they will be working from a more solid foundation.”
The company is building up experimental data sets using novel techniques in flow chemistry, in which reactions are carried out in a continuous flow rather than in batch vessels.
“The data we collect in flow is more accurate because we have a more precisely controlled set of conditions and plenty of control over how those conditions change. It’s also a more efficient way to collect the data,” said Dr Schrecker.
The technology is based on techniques that Dr Schrecker developed as a PhD student at Imperial’s EPSRC-funded REACT Centre for Doctoral Training with Professor Mimi Hii from the Department of Chemistry, Professor Klaus Hellgardt from the Department of Chemical Engineering, and co-supervision and funding from BASF.
SOLVE will offer its services to clients from across the chemical and pharmaceutical industries including BASF, which is already a customer.
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