Co-Founder & CTO - AI Catalyst Discovery Venture

The Venture

Discovering a better catalyst still runs on trial and error: form a hypothesis, synthesise a few candidates, test, repeat, for years, at a cost measured in millions. Most of the search space is never touched. It is one of the slowest, most expensive bottlenecks between the chemicals industry and a lower-carbon future.

We're building the company to change that. Spun out of A*STAR, our platform closes the loop between computation and the lab: machine learning proposes catalyst compositions worth making, simulation screens them, and an automated experimental workflow validates the winners, feeding every result back to sharpen the next cycle. It reaches candidates a traditional programme never would, in a fraction of the time and cost.

The beachhead is CO₂ to methanol and green chemicals, where industry pull is real and the economics work. Most catalyst work is improving a recipe that already exists, and the incumbent supplier usually keeps that business. The opportunity is a new process with no incumbent catalyst, and an unusual number of those are arriving between now and 2030. The core discovery IP is being licensed from A*STAR, with the inventor on board as an advisor. What the venture needs now is a founding technical leader to own the science and build the company around it.

The Role

You'll be the founding CTO. You'll own everything from the discovery campaign to a catalyst a customer can actuall