Aether, a Menlo Park, CA-based nanoscale machinery company that can assemble new classes of molecules to create enhanced products, raised $49M in Series A funding.
The round was led by Jay Zaveri at Natural Capital and Trevor Zimmerman at Unless.
The company intends to use the funds to scale its platform and grow its engineering, machine learning, and hardware teams.
Led by CEO Pavle Jeremic, Aether provides a molecular assembler platform that can extract lithium from previously-inaccessible reserves and create enhanced products across industries including automotive, healthcare, home electronics, and more. The platform combines high-throughput robotics, machine learning, and synthetic biology to map millions of enzyme-reaction combinations. By generating high amounts of experimental data, the platform is able to engineer entirely new classes of nanoscale machines using protein building blocks called molecular assemblers. These molecular assemblers contain the power and sophistication of gigantic chemical factories, but on the scale of nanometers.
Aether will initially focus its lithium extraction efforts in the southern, middle portions of the United States, including Oklahoma and Arkansas, where subterranean lithium exists in sizable amounts but at lower concentrations. Texas and Oklahoma will also be key areas of focus given the company’s ability to extract lithium from oil and gas wastewater byproducts, as well as capped oil wells.
