Albert Invent

Albert Invent, founded in 2022 and based in Oakland, California, develops an end-to-end research and development platform for the chemical and materials science industries. The product combines structured data capture with AI models intended to accelerate formulation and materials discovery. Core platform components described by the company and its investors include an inventory module with a pre-loaded library of more than 50,000 commercially available chemicals, an Excel-alternative worksheet for designing formulations, experiment tracking with structured data capture, electronic lab notebooks with block-based editing and chemical drawing, project management, and regulatory automation that generates safety data sheets and labels using built-in rules covering 400,000 chemical substances. An AI layer, marketed as Albert Insights and later as Albert Breakthrough and Ask Albert, provides recommendations, property predictions, experiment suggestions, and formulation optimization.

The company positions itself against siloed and legacy R&D record-keeping in the chemicals sector, and states it has developed methods for digitizing and unifying research records at scale, from paper notebooks to fragmented legacy software and desktop files. Its AI is described as built on a foundation of 15 million molecular structures and algorithms trained on data from more than 50,000 raw materials, then further trained on each customer's proprietary experimental data. Beyond software, Albert offers change management services including readiness assessments, training, and ongoing support.

Founding story

Albert traces its origins to Molecule, a 3D-printing materials company launched by chemical engineer Nick Talken with Ken Kisner. To organize and speed lab work, the pair hired data experts to build software designed specifically for scientists. Molecule was later acquired by adhesives maker Henkel, which further developed the software and then spun it off as the separate entity Albert Invent. Index Ventures describes Talken and Kisner as former chemicals entrepreneurs in the 3D materials space who created Albert to connect processes, data, and insights into a single end-to-end source of truth for chemicals R&D.

Business model

Albert sells a software platform to chemical, materials science, and personal care companies, deployed to scientists across customer labs, and complements it with implementation and change-management services such as readiness assessments and training. Customer data is described as isolated, encrypted, and used to train customer-specific models. The company has also built customer-facing digital portals, such as Nouryon's BeautyCreations formulation portal, which it frames as a new revenue channel for customers.

Sources do not disclose pricing or contract structure; the platform is offered as a cloud-based R&D software platform to enterprise customers, with demos requested through the company website.

Traction

Index Ventures reported thousands of users in more than 30 countries in June 2023. Named customers across sources include Henkel (described as one of Albert's largest customers), Chemours, Diversey, Keystone Industries, Nouryon, Solenis, 3D Systems, Applied Molecules, and Kenvue. The company website cites 3,000 scientists across 142 labs achieving 2x speed to market, development time reduced from three months to two days, and 1,800 formulas downloaded from an AI discovery portal. C&EN reported over a dozen partnerships as of October 2025.

Latest developments

In October 2025, C&EN reported a partnership under which chemists across Kenvue gain access to Albert's AI platform, configured so models can learn from Kenvue's proprietary data, with plans to roll it out to all Kenvue scientists creating formulations in the lab. The article also stated Albert had raised over $50 million to date and had over a dozen partnerships. Earlier, Albert announced a growth round led by J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners with Coatue and TCV, taking total funding past $45 million, to be used for global team building and scaling to meet customer demand.