Eight leaders with decades of experience across MIT, Max Planck, Schrödinger, Solvay, LANXESS, AkzoNobel, Dow, Ginkgo Bioworks, LanzaTech, BCG, and beyond join Dunia to scale its integrated AI and autonomous-lab platform toward deep industrial deployment.
BERLIN, DE / ACCESS Newswire / May 7, 2026 / Dunia, the programmable matter company, today announced the formation of its Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) and Commercial Advisory Board (CAB). Together, the eight advisors bring together expertise and leadership from pioneering academics, experienced CEOs, scale-up operators, and computational science leaders to help accelerate the deployment of new materials across verticals from batteries to semiconductors to chemical catalysts. These advisors join Dunia as the company scales its integrated AI and autonomous-lab platform into an industrial-grade materials production system.
AI has transformed how we model and shape the world. But the link between computational discovery taking place in silico and true industrial impact in the inhabited world lies in the materials we use, those complex physical substrates on which every energy, chemical, and manufacturing breakthrough ultimately depends. Pure-simulation approaches to developing new materials have hit a ceiling: the published scientific record is fragmented, inconsistently reproduced, and too sparse to train models that can be confidently deployed in industrial settings. Closing the gap between what works in simulation and what holds up under industrial conditions will require something new.
That's why Dunia is building a full-stack platform to bridge the Sim2Real, or Simulation-to-Reality, gap stymieing progress in the deployment of new materials. Dunia's innovative closed-loop process integrates next-generation AI models and high-throughput automated laboratory testing to systematically discover the paradigm-shifting materials the world is missing.
Dunia's team has been working on this problem for nearly a decade - longer than most of the AI-for-materials category has existed as a category. The composition of these two new advisory boards reflect Dunia's core thesis: that transformative breakthroughs in energy, chemicals, and broader material abundance will require exactly this kind of full-stack integration across AI, automation, hardware, and materials science, coupled with commercial execution that will facilitate adoption at-scale.
"The scientists and operators joining our advisory boards have spent decades at the frontiers of each of these fields, and their collective experience maps precisely onto the problems Dunia is working to solve," said Dr. Alex Hammer, Dunia's CEO and co-founder. "No other platform unifies AI research, automation engineering, quantum chemistry, and industrial focus in a single, integrated discovery engine. I'm so energized by the depth of expertise and industry-leading talent our advisors bring to Dunia and by their excitement for our mission."
Accelerating Material Science at Scale
Dunia's Scientific Advisory Board brings together frontier theoreticians, experimentalists, and pioneers of materials acceleration platforms, each of whom has spent their career at some seam of the problem Dunia is now solving at scale. Their work spans multiscale modeling for catalysis and energy conversion, electrolytes and battery interfaces, semiconductors and solar cells, and the design of automated laboratory platforms that generate data robust enough for modern AI models as well as frontier AI research grounded in physics.
They include:
Prof. Dr. Karsten Reuter, Director of the Theory Department at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin; former Spokesperson of the DFG "e-conversion" Excellence Cluster; and a pioneer in AI-enabled AI-enabled quantum chemistry. Prof. Dr. Reuter shared: "We're entering a new era where AI, automation, and real-world experimentation converge. Self-driving labs don't just accelerate discovery, they generate the kind of high-quality data industry needs to act with confidence. That's what makes this moment so critical for catalysis and the climate."
Prof. Dr. Christoph Brabec, Chair of Materials for Electronics and Energy Technology at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Director of the Institute of Materials and Devices 3 (Photovoltaics) at Forschungszentrum Jülich; author of 900+ peer-reviewed publications; former CTO of Konarka Technologies; and a leader in high-throughput materials acceleration platforms and emerging photovoltaics. Prof. Dr. Brabec noted that: "Over the past decade we learned that materials acceleration platforms are more than a combination of automated robots and sensors with analysis software. What closes the loop between computation and industrial relevance is hardware, software, and domain knowledge united in adaptive workflows at a level of integration that is genuinely difficult to build. Dunia is the very rare team I've seen approaching this complex problem with the seriousness the problem deserves."
Prof. Dr. Yang Shao-Horn, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; first female recipient of the Faraday Medal; member of the National Academy of Engineering; Humboldt Research Award recipient; and a global leader in electrocatalysis and battery interfaces. Dr. Marcus Tze-Kiat, CTO and co-founder of Dunia, added: "In electrocatalysis and energy materials, Yang is one of the few people who has shaped both the questions the field asks and the methods used to answer them. That combination of rigor and relevance is critical for us. As we scale a closed-loop system that learns from real-world data, her input helps ensure we are grounding our approach in the realities that ultimately determine industrial success."
Deploying at Depth
Dunia's Commercial Advisory Board brings together the operators, strategists, and scale-up leaders who have built and advised the modern specialty chemicals, green chemistry, and computational science industries.
They have taken companies public, architected partnerships between small technology firms and global industrial corporations, traversing the entire map of the chemical and petrochemical sectors. Their presence reflects a commercial reality Dunia is already navigating: demand for next-generation materials is arriving faster than conventional approaches can supply it, and the companies that combine scientific depth with commercial discipline from day one will define the next industrial cycle. These advisors bring the experience necessary to convert Dunia's scientific traction into industrial delivery at speed.
They include:
Dr. Jörg Weiser, Executive Chairman of Kvantify, former Managing Director and Executive Vice President at Schrödinger (20 years), where he built the company's global enterprise presence; and architect of major computational-chemistry partnerships across pharma and materials. Dr. Weiser added: "Startups bring speed and bold innovation. Large industries bring scale and staying power. Progress is mediated by collaboration, mutually recognizing each other's strengths without bias. The future belongs to those who have the courage to find each other, and that starts with trust, data, and a rational commitment to solving hard problems."
Babette Pettersen, global scale-up leader across green chemicals and industrial biotech; former CCO at BioAmber; commercialization roles at Ginkgo Bioworks, LanzaTech, DSM, and Dow Corning (20+ years); Supervisory Board member at Paques Biomaterials; and an operator who has built commercial architecture around science-driven platforms from pilot to industrial deployment. Babette Pettersen noted: "In today's industrial landscape, speed and performance are decisive, and materials innovation defines competitiveness. AI-driven discovery has the potential to fundamentally reshape how we develop innovative materials, beyond what conventional experimentation can achieve. Dunia's model augments scientific intuition at scale to enable the next generation of high performance, sustainable materials."
Dr. Hans-Joachim Müller, former Chief Executive Officer of Azelis, leading the company through IPO on Euronext Brussels; former member of the Executive Board at Clariant and Managing Board at Süd-Chemie (Catalytic Technologies); currently Non-Executive Director at AkzoNobel, LANXESS, and OMV; and a leader who has built and scaled multibillion-euro specialty chemicals organizations globally. Dr. Müller shared: "Specialty chemicals has always been a performance business: customers buy materials that meet a specification under conditions they care about in a thoroughly-vetted environment, not some products that look promising in a paper. The bar for any new approach is whether it produces results that hold up at industrial scale. I'm very enthusiastic about Dunia's future because they have been building exactly toward that bar from day one."
Dr. Patrick Maestro, former Scientific Director Rhodia and Solvay (~20 years); member of the French Academy of Technologies; recipient of the CNRS Medal of Innovation; specialist in rare earths, catalysis, and advanced inorganic materials; and an architect of global academic-industrial research partnerships. Dr. Maestro added: "Industrial R&D has always had the necessity to navigate the gap between what is elegant in the laboratory and what is viable at scale. The most persistent problems in catalysis and advanced inorganics are not the ones a single brilliant insight can solve; they are the ones that require disciplined, science-based, iteration across modeling and experiment. Dunia's platform is designed for exactly that kind of iteration, and its team understands the industrial context in which the results need to land."
Dr. Udo Jung, Senior Advisor and Senior Partner Emeritus at BCG (30+ years); founder and long-term leader of BCG's global Chemicals & Petrochemicals practices; advisor on Fortune 500 growth strategy, portfolio transformation, and post-merger integration; and active investor across green chemistry and sustainable chemicals ventures. Dr. Jung noted: "The chemicals and materials industries are entering a period of structural change, driven by innovation of deep tech applications, the need for defossilisation, supply chain realignment, and the emergence of AI as a genuine productivity layer. The companies that will lead the next cycle are those that can combine scientific depth with commercial discipline. Dunia is positioned at exactly that intersection, and the breadth of this advisory group reflects the scale of the opportunity."
The formation of these advisory boards builds on strong early backing from Sequoia Scout Fund and an accomplished group of angel supporters, including Dr. Carlos Hartel, former CTO of Climeworks and former CTO of GE Europe; and Dr. Chris Gibson, co-founder and former CEO of Recursion.
ABOUT DUNIA
Dunia Innovations is a Berlin-based deep-tech company redefining how the world discovers new materials. To close the "simulation-to-reality" gap, Dunia is building the world's most advanced autonomous lab platform, combining AI, automated experimentation, and materials science models to bring R&D to industrial scale. Its first node, IRIS, fuses robotics, real-world data, and multi-modal learning to accelerate the design of next-generation materials across a range of industries - from energy and chemicals to advanced manufacturing - building the discovery engine for a sustainable, abundant future.
Contact:
Gonzalo Arenas
Email: hello@dunia.ai
Phone: +49 15560 431896
SOURCE: Dunia Innovations GmbH
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