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🌊 When AI hits the atom

Why the future of materials discovery won’t be built on simulations alone.

We’re joined by Ahmed Ismail, Co-founder & COO of Dunia, a Berlin-based deeptech company building AI- and robotics-powered systems to accelerate the discovery and scale-up of industrial breakthrough materials.

In this episode, we dive into one of the biggest bottlenecks in climate and industrial innovation: materials discovery, and unpack why the real opportunity is not just asking AI to invent new formulas, but building the physical infrastructure to test, validate, and scale them.

In our conversation, we covered:

→ Why so many scientific breakthroughs still depend on serendipity — and how AI might increase the frequency of those “lucky” moments.

→ The difference between AI-generated materials, simulation-first approaches, and autonomous industrial labs.

→ Why the sim-to-real gap is the central challenge in AI for materials: what looks perfect on a computer often fails in a reactor.

→ How Dunia built IRIS, an autonomous industrial lab designed to generate high-quality, device-level data for real-world applications.

→ Why the future may belong to vertical, industry-specific AI systems — not one general “ChatGPT for materials.”

AI for good. 🔥

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#91 - Ahmed Ismail - Dunia - Where AI meets material discovery