Year-Old Korean Startup NanoForge AI Raises $10 Million to Discover Next-Generation Materials

The 17-person company is already testing its materials with Samsung and battery and steel leaders; KAIST Professor Seunghwa Ryu joins as Technical Advisor

SF, CA, UNITED STATES, November 4, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Less than a year after it was founded, South Korean startup NanoForge AI is testing its AI-designed materials with world-leading manufacturers, including Samsung Electronics, a top battery maker and a major steelmaker.

The company today announced it has raised $10.4 million, in a Seed round led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment. DSC Investment, state-run Korea Development Bank and EcoPro Partners, the venture arm of battery-materials group EcoPro, also joined. Existing backers FuturePlay and Mashup Ventures invested again, bringing total funding to more than $11 million.

NanoForge AI now has 17 employees, a Korea-based team of materials scientists and AI researchers. The company has completed or is running proof-of-concept projects with more than 5 Korean and global manufacturers across semiconductors, batteries and steel. They include EcoPro BM, one of Korea’s largest makers of battery cathode materials, whose affiliate Ecopro Partners invested in this round.

Beyond its industrial collaborations, NanoForge AI is also building an international research network, working with researchers affiliated with Seoul National University (SNU), KAIST, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) to advance AI-driven materials discovery.

The Breakthrough the Materials Industry Has Been Waiting For

South Korea is a global powerhouse in memory chips and electric-vehicle batteries, yet still relies on foreign suppliers for many of the specialized materials behind them. Building those materials at home is slow: developing a new one typically takes years of trial-and-error experiments.

NanoForge AI shortcuts that process by predicting how a material will behave down to the level of its electrons. While most atomistic AI models focus on the forces between atoms, which govern properties such as thermal expansion and ion movement, NanoForge AI goes a step further: it has developed its own AI model to predict a material’s electronic structure, including its energy bands and how electrons behave, and is continuing to advance its capabilities.

These electronic properties determine whether a material conducts electricity, absorbs light or holds a charge. They are critical to semiconductors and batteries, yet calculating them conventionally remains one of the most computationally demanding tasks in materials science.

The company will use the new funds to scale that model and expand its autonomous laboratory, which synthesizes and tests AI-designed materials. Through a closed-loop feedback system, experimental results guide the AI in selecting what to test next, continuously refining its predictions and accelerating materials discovery.

NanoForge AI is competing in one of the hottest corners of AI investing, and doing it on a fraction of the budget. Cambridge, England-based CuspAI raised $450 million in July at a $2.6 billion valuation, and Periodic Labs, a San Francisco startup founded by former OpenAI and Google researchers, launched last year with a $300 million seed round. NanoForge AI has reached the industrial-testing stage on about $11 million in total funding and a team of 17, proof that capital efficiency, not just capital, will decide who wins.

“A single breakthrough material can redefine the technological limits of an entire industry,” said Donghyun Kim, CEO of NanoForge AI. “We’re building a platform that integrates AI-driven materials design with autonomous experimentation, allowing each experimental result to refine our models and guide the next discovery. Together with Professors Ryu and Park, our goal is to translate advances in AI and materials science into high-performance materials that address industry’s most demanding challenges.”

KAIST advisory team expands

Alongside the funding, NanoForge AI named Seunghwa Ryu, a distinguished professor of mechanical engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), as a technical adviser. Professor Ryu, a specialist in physics-based multiscale modeling, heads KAIST’s AX department and its PRISM-AI research center for AI-driven design and manufacturing. He will advise on manufacturing process optimization and multiscale materials modeling, and support industry partnerships and talent recruitment.

“By combining physics-based modeling with AI, we can connect materials design to actual production processes,” Professor Ryu said. “I look forward to helping NanoForge AI’s technology deliver tangible results on the factory floor.”

He joins Chanyoung Park, a KAIST professor of industrial and systems engineering who has advised the company since 2025. Professor Park studies how graph machine learning and large language models can predict the properties of molecules and materials, and has published at leading AI conferences including NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR. He advises on core technology and R&D strategy and supports collaboration among industry, academia and research institutes.

“With AI that understands the structure and properties of materials, we can expand the frontier of new materials discovery,” Professor Park said. “I will help ensure the latest research translates into real materials development.”

About NanoForge AI

Founded in 2025, NanoForge AI is an AI-native materials IP company. The company combines AI-driven materials discovery with autonomous experimentation to develop and validate new industrial materials and create proprietary materials IP. Beyond that, the company is developing core technology that uses AI to predict the electronic structure of materials, expanding the range of problems materials AI can solve.

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