Materials AI has a reality problem: the models are trained mostly on simulations, and most of what they predict never gets made. Dr. Andrey Ivankin, co-founder and CTO of Mattiq, is building the machine that produces real experimental data at scale.

Mattiq prints hundreds of thousands of unique nanomaterials onto a single chip, each positionally encoded, then screens them. It's the genomic chip, brought to inorganic materials. We cover what that does to the discovery loop, where characterization gets slow, why the previous generation of materials informatics companies couldn't generalize beyond one vertical, and what Andrey would tell a technical founder who's thinking about leaving the lab.

Andrey's take on the state of the field: "The training data is mostly computational, most predictions never validated. We need to change that."

Guest: Dr. Andrey Ivankin — co-founder and CTO of Mattiq, co-founder of TERA-print, chemical physicist and engineer. Mattiq has raised close to $25M in venture capital plus government funding and is currently raising a Series A.

Mentioned:

— Polymer pen lithography, and Chad Mirkin's lab

— Scanning droplet electrochemical cell; AFM; STEM and EELS

— The Inorganic Crystal Structure Database — roughly 250,000 materials

— Google DeepMind's GNoME; Lila, Periodic Labs, Radical AI

— The Genesis program

A podcast from FedTech.

Dr. James Warren has directed the Materials Genome Initiative since 2012. Fifteen years after the US government set out to halve materials development time, he explains what landed, what didn't, and where the door is for founders.

We cover why materials science is really just cooking, when AI is worth reaching for, what a self-driving lab does that a supercomputer can't, and why a 7:1 return on investment still isn't enough to move a manufacturer that's already profitable.

Warren's argument, in one line: adoption isn't a question of if. "Whether we have to go through a full Gartner hype cycle on this, I don't know. What I do know is that this is inevitable."

Guest: Dr. James A. Warren — NIST physicist since 1992, Director of the Materials Genome Initiative, co-founder and director of the NIST Center for Theoretical and Computational Materials Science.

Mentioned:

— Warren's paper, "Overcoming Roadblocks for Implementing AI/ML Methods for Materials Advancement" (Annual Review of Materials Research, 2026)

— NSF's programmable cloud labs: $400M, 20 teams, four years

— DOE's Genesis Mission

A podcast from FedTech.