As researchers and practitioners of materials science, we were frustrated by the slowness, high costs and overall limitation to innovation imposed by traditional materials R&D processes. Therefore, the following questions constantly orbited our minds:

• How to create breakthrough materials more often?
• How to transform “discovery by accident” into “intentional discover”?
• How to make materials R&D more affordable?
• What if we could develop and commercialize new material and formulations in months, instead of years?

Hence, at different stages of our lives, we started looking for more efficient approaches to overcome these issues. We envisioned a promising path on the combined use of high throughput experimentation and artificial intelligence applied to materials, and, after adopting and creating tools at SMART (Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology), MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and A*STAR (Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research), we are sure this is the right approach to address the pain points faced by the materials researchers and developers across the globe.

On doing that, we pioneered the combined use of high throughput experimentation and artificial intelligence applied to materials, and have world-class results to back us up, such as the AMDM programme (Accelerated Materials Development for Manufacture) at A*STAR, first of its kind, now being replicated broadly.

A natural further step for entrepreneurial-minded individuals like us was to create Xinterra, to broadly apply the benefits of the technologies we developed at our home institutions.

Our Founding Team

Our founding team is composed of world-class materials engineers with a combined 100 years of experience making new materials in solar energy, thermoelectrics, green chemistry, nanomaterials and carbon removal.

Sustainability is our core value, and we have devoted our lives to creating materials for sustainable applications, the hard way. We are now motivated to have a greater impact, using these effective approaches to realize a “new world of materials”.

We are hands on builders and we have a unique combination where our team possesses deep understanding of three facets of the accelerated materials innovation cycle: deep expertise in materials science, high-throughput experimentation, and artificial intelligence.

In 2018, members from our founding team created a pan-Singaporean, multi-million dollar, 5-year research programme called Accelerated Materials Development for Manufacturing, led by IMRE, A*STAR (Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research) with partnerships from other A*STAR Research Institutes and National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU). As a centrepiece of this programme, artificial intelligence and high-throughput experiments were unified into a seamless closed-loop platform. Dozens of new materials with user-specified properties were created, several of which with industrial partners.

Today, we are proud to offer the capability of developing new materials faster, harnessing the power of human and machine intelligence, to all companies, through our Xinterra Design Factory™.