£4m seed backs autonomous AI lab to speed drug and agrochemical development
This article covers SOLVE Chemistry, a biotech startup spun out of Imperial College London, which has closed a £4m seed funding round to scale its AI-driven lab platform that speeds chemical process development. The funding is intended to expand lab capacity, hire staff and develop capabilities to shorten the time and cost of bringing pharmaceutical, agrochemical and specialty chemical products to market.
SOLVE Chemistry, a biotech startup spun out of Imperial College London, has closed a £4 million seed funding round to scale its AI-driven lab platform that speeds chemical process development. The money will be used to expand lab capacity, hire staff and develop capabilities that aim to shorten the time and cost involved in bringing pharmaceutical and agrochemical products to market.
Why it matters
Designing chemical production lines can be time-consuming and costly, delaying patient access to drugs and slowing the rollout of new crop protection products. Faster, more predictable process development also reduces the chance that market conditions change before a product reaches commercial scale.
SOLVE Chemistry’s approach — combining rapid experimental data collection with predictive models — targets that bottleneck. If the platform delivers on its promise, manufacturers could compress what are often months of experimentation into weeks, improving both cost efficiency and sustainability of chemical production.
Inside the product
SOLVE operates a self-driving lab in London that uses bespoke ultra-high-throughput hardware to collect experimental reaction data at scale. The company says its system captures accurate data on chemical reactions up to 20 times faster than traditional high-throughput experimentation and uses AI to predict optimal manufacturing routes.
The start-up has built workflows that move from data capture to AI-led prediction to practical guidance for process scale. It reports generating revenue and securing grant funding while working with major industrial partners to validate its platform in real-world settings.
SOLVE Chemistry spun out of Imperial in April 2024 in an unusually fast timeframe for university exits — the team left the lab within a month — and initially operated from Imperial’s White City Deep Tech Campus before expanding into larger lab facilities at Scale Space. The company says the funding will allow it to quadruple production capacity and broaden its commercial offering for pharmaceutical, agrochemical and specialty chemical customers.
Who are the investors?
The £4 million seed round was led by XTX Ventures, with participation from SuperSeed, Creator Fund and climate-focused Endgame Capital. The round also attracted business angels and experienced executives: Raif Jacobs from Inovia Capital (noted for more than a decade at Google and formerly CFO of Deliveroo), Simon Franks of Redbus Ventures (founder of LoveFilm, now Amazon Prime Video) and Debora Fang (formerly Head of M&A at Unilever).
The investor group combines deep tech capital, climate-focused capital and operational expertise intended to help SOLVE move from lab validation to commercial scale. The presence of climate and industrial investors signals interest in emissions and resource-efficiency gains from smarter chemical manufacture.
In the announcement, Al Giles, Venture Partner at Creator Fund, said:
We backed SOLVE Chemistry from day one because of their potential to transform the speed new drugs and agrochemicals are produced, as well as the founders’ infectious drive. In just 18 months, they’ve won over some of the world’s biggest companies. We’re thrilled to welcome new top-tier investors and continue supporting SOLVE Chemistry as they scale.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Dr Linden Schrecker, CEO of SOLVE Chemistry, said:
Across the different chemical industries everyone wants to be more efficient and produce the compounds society needs quicker, despite the challenges industry faces. We are helping pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and specialty chemical companies do just that.
Dr Schrecker co-founded the company with Dr Jose Pablo Folch and early hires Dr Sarah Boyall and Dr Tom Dixon, who helped translate academic research into an automated, commercially-oriented platform.
The bigger picture
The deal underlines momentum in UK lab automation and AI applications for chemical and drug development, areas that attract interest from biotech investors keen on tools that reduce time-to-market and carbon intensity. SOLVE’s partnerships with industrial players such as BASF and unnamed multinational pharmaceutical companies provide a testing ground for commercialisation and regulatory alignment.
As more capital flows into deep tech labs across hubs like White City and WestTech London, the funding reflects a broader pattern: investors are placing bets on companies that can industrialise automated experimentation and apply machine learning to traditionally manual sectors. For the UK and European ecosystem, success here could help retain advanced chemical R&D domestically and offer exporters more predictable manufacturing pathways.
They've invested in SOLVE Chemistry
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