Introducing Altara
Today, we're excited to introduce Altara, the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world.
The first wave of AI has transformed digital work like writing, coding, and customer support. But while the digital world has accelerated, the physical world is still catching up. We are now entering a new era defined by frontier developments in hardware: from high-performance semiconductors and long-range batteries to autonomous robots and deep-space rockets.
These breakthroughs share a common foundation: they are entirely dependent on frontier physical science research and discovery.
The Bottleneck in Scientific R&D
The journey from a laboratory hypothesis to a manufactured technology is incredibly lengthy and complex. This path from a hypothesis to commercialization is heavily bottlenecked by:
- Extreme data fragmentation: Mission-critical information is spread between domain-specific software, spreadsheets, data lakes, and long-tail text data like technical reports and PowerPoints.
- Legacy systems: We've talked with Fortune 500 companies operating on software built 50 years ago and storing critical data in on-prem systems with unsupported, vendor-defunct software. Scientists refer to these systems as "the place data goes to die."
- Manual, high-stakes analysis: Data analysis in these fields is used to make decisions in the real world – like what experiment to run next or whether to shut down a manufacturing line. Scientists and engineers spend outsized percentages of their time on this kind of manual data wrangling.
Bridging the Gap: From R&D to Manufacturing
We've seen software evolve to the point where it takes two minutes to build a website that used to take two months – yet we still live in a world where it can take 36 months to bring a new semiconductor chip to market. Imagine what the world could look like if that was cut down to a fraction of that time: so we could both invent better technology and bring that technology into the world faster.
Altara is enabling that future, capturing critical scientific and engineering processes through the entire product lifecycle – R&D to manufacturing – to collapse weeks of work down to minutes.
Our agents ingest and reason across the complex, multimodal data of the physical sciences, such as semiconductor wafer maps, high-resolution inspection data like SEM images, large-scale instrument time series data, scattered spreadsheets, unstructured research, and domain-specific legacy systems.
Ultimately, that means helping companies:
- Design better experiments
- Diagnose and resolve failures faster
- Surface insights they would otherwise miss
- Automate slow, complex analysis pipelines
- Compress the timeline from discovery to commercialization
- Bring breakthrough technologies from lab to market faster.
To support this vision, we've raised a $7M seed round from Greylock Partners, Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors including Jeff Dean and leadership from OpenAI and AMD.
Work with us
See Altara in action or request access by .
If you want to accelerate scientific breakthroughs across frontier industries, check out our open roles at altara.co/careers. Our team (ex-Applied Intuition, SpaceX, Warp, Jane Street, Microsoft) works in-person in San Francisco.
