BITTERFELD-WOLFEN, Germany and REDWOOD CITY, Calif., [DATE] - Forum Rathenau and Citrine Informatics today announced a collaboration supporting Scale New Chemistry, a Green Deep Tech Bootcamp designed to transform industrial challenges into scalable solutions and new businesses for the chemical and materials industries.
The initiative brings together regional companies, researchers, entrepreneurs, and industry experts to address practical challenges in areas including CO2 reduction, circular use of resources, sustainable raw materials, and new chemical-industry business models. Forum Rathenau’s approach begins with concrete needs identified by industry and supports interdisciplinary teams in developing technically and commercially viable solutions.
Through the collaboration, Citrine will provide participating teams with access to its AI-powered materials informatics platform, as well as training and continuous technical support. The platform will serve as the digital backbone of the program, giving teams a shared environment in which to structure experimental data, develop predictive models, optimize research decisions, and retain knowledge throughout the development process.
Because the Citrine Platform is material agnostic, it can seamlessly support startups working across different chemical and material classes. Teams developing polymers, catalysts, battery materials, composites, metals, or other advanced technologies can use the same digital infrastructure while configuring their workflows around their own scientific challenges. This allows the program to support a diverse portfolio of companies without creating separate digital systems for every application.
“In the chemical industry in particular, the path from a forward-looking idea to a marketable product is often a long one. Between laboratory validation and industrial application lies the challenging pilot-scale phase, during which many promising approaches get stuck due to a lack of capital, infrastructure, and access to industrial partners. This is exactly where ‘Scale New Chemistry’ comes in: The program supports startups at this critical juncture and connects them with the expertise, facilities, and market knowledge available in the Chemical Triangle,” says Professor Ralf Wehrspohn, Chairman of the Board of Forum Rathenau.
The region offers ideal conditions for this: established chemical sites with the necessary infrastructure, a well-connected industrial landscape, and a strong research base.
“With the two projects ‘Create’ and ‘Scale New Chemistry,’ Forum Rathenau has introduced and further developed a new format in the region - one that, in my view, has long been missing. Bringing together startups and established chemical companies around common topics has the potential to be a key element in a successful transformation toward a carbon-neutral circular economy,” says Patrice Heine, Managing Director of the Bitterfeld-Wolfen Chemical Park and Board Member of Forum Rathenau, regarding the program.
Citrine will support participating teams from initial technical validation and onboarding through iterative AI-enabled development sprints. The work will help teams assess their data, define suitable modeling tasks, test material hypotheses, and translate technical results into decision-ready information for founders, mentors, and industrial partners.
“Innovation happens fastest when scientists, entrepreneurs, and industrial partners can learn from data together,” said Greg Mulholland, CEO of Citrine Informatics. “Our mission is to enable a greener, more efficient world by accelerating the development and deployment of next-generation materials and chemicals. By providing the digital backbone for Scale New Chemistry, we can help startups make smarter R&D decisions, reduce time-consuming trial-and-error experimentation, and bring sustainable technologies with real environmental and economic impact to market faster.”
The collaboration builds on Forum Rathenau’s work to connect industry, science, startups, and regional infrastructure in support of a circular economy. Previous bootcamp teams have worked on challenges such as recovering useful materials from industrial by-products, reducing the energy demand of separation processes, improving battery insulation, and creating new local value chains from waste streams.
By combining this physical and entrepreneurial ecosystem with a common AI-enabled digital infrastructure, Forum Rathenau and Citrine aim to shorten development cycles, reduce technical risk, and make advanced materials development more accessible to emerging companies.
The partnership is intended to benefit not only the participating teams, but also the wider startup and industrial ecosystem. Reusable data structures, validated workflows, and transferable best practices can provide a scalable foundation for future cohorts and help more sustainable chemistry innovations move from research into commercial application.
About Forum Rathenau
Based in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Forum Rathenau e.V. is driving the transformation process in the Central German Mining Region. Founded in 2019, the project promotes innovations in the carbon cycle economy. Since 2023, it has been funded as part of the STARK Program of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. On the path toward a post-fossil, sustainable carbon competence cluster in Saxony-Anhalt, the research staff focus on school education, develop lifelong learning formats, promote corporate transformations and start-ups, and use communication formats to highlight the opportunities offered by the post-fossil circular economy.
About Citrine Informatics
Citrine Informatics provides an AI platform purpose-built for materials and chemicals product development. Citrine helps technical teams use data, domain expertise, and artificial intelligence to accelerate materials design, formulation, process optimization, and manufacturing innovation.