Albert Invent raises $55M Series B led by TCV for chemistry-focused R&D AI

Albert, the Oakland, California company also known as Albert Invent, has raised a $55 million Series B led by growth investor TCV. The round was reported by CHEManager on 15 October 2026. The SaaS News dates the funding to 13 October. Albert plans to use the money to build out its AI for chemistry, with the aim of shortening R&D cycles and getting products to market faster.

Who invested

TCV led the round. New backers include Delta-V Capital, Socium Ventures, HighSage Ventures, Coral Capital and Legion VC. Existing investors Coatue, J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Index Ventures and Applied Ventures also took part.

The numbers

Albert's growth figures are all year on year:

26x more projects created on the platform, 6x more scientists using it, now across 44 countries, and 4x more workflows built.

Its named partners are mostly chemicals and consumer goods names: AkzoNobel, Avient, BASF, Chemours, Clorox, Henkel, Kenvue and Nouryon.

What it sells

The core product is Albert OS, an AI operating system for R&D teams that is built around chemistry. On top of that sits Ask Albert, a natural-language assistant that draws on tools, agents and models to surface what an organisation already knows, propose formulation candidates, design experiments and analyse data. Albert says it went from an AI search tool to a full R&D partner in around six months.

Underneath is Valence, Albert's own chemistry-specific model, which the company says is 45x more accurate than general-purpose AI at retrieving correct answers to scientific queries. Albert also built FormBench, a benchmark for testing AI on formulation chemistry. For enterprise buyers, it highlights zero data retention, fine-grained access controls and audit trails of the model's reasoning.

"Enterprise AI for chemistry has to be built from the ontology up" Nick Talken, CEO and co-founder, Albert

The bigger picture

Most of the noise in R&D software this autumn has been about biology and drug discovery. Albert is a reminder that chemicals, materials and formulation R&D is a sizeable market of its own, with large incumbents sitting on decades of lab data. The pitch from Albert and its investors is that a model trained to understand chemistry, rather than a general model, is what turns that data into faster product development.