Over the past year Mattiq has quickly emerged as the most technologically advanced clean chemistry company enabling commercially viable decarbonization of the building blocks of our world.
We entered 2023 with a company rebrand from Stoicheia to Mattiq (materials + IQ), coupled with a $15 million seed funding round and the appointment of technology leader and entrepreneur, Jeff Erhardt, as Chief Executive Officer.
Mattiq was born out of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern University in 2021 where our co-founders, Chad Mirkin and Andrey Ivankin, were inspired to create the first ‘chemistry for climate’ platform. At the beginning of 2023, Chad Mirkin was awarded the prestigious King Faisal Prize in Medicine and Science for his contributions to nanochemistry and ground-breaking discoveries. Andrey Ivankin was recently honored as a finalist for the 2023 Rising Star Individual Award by S&P Global Commodity Insights for revolutionizing the discovery of novel materials and development of new processes that can be used to decarbonize chemical and fuel production.
In 2023, Mattiq received industry recognition for our first-of-its-kind approach to decarbonizing chemical and fuel production. We were recently named a finalist in Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards and won the silver medal in the 2023 Merit Awards. We also received five government-backed grants this year from the Department Of Energy (including the esteemed ARPA-E program) and the National Science Foundation. The funding is furthering the development and application of our technology across a range of industries and use cases including clean hydrogen, fuel cells, and biomass valorization, among others. We also continued working with the National Energy Technology Laboratory to accelerate the atomic-level design and development of efficient electrocatalysts through a 2022 award from the Department of Energy’s High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation Initiative.
Collaborative Industry Engagement
Mattiq leaders also shared expertise and collaborated with industry stakeholders at major conferences centered around technological innovation and industrial decarbonization. In June, Mattiq’s director of business development, Andrew Mirkin, took the stage for a panel titled “Hydrogen, Biofuel, Electrification, and CCUS” at the Valve World Americas Conference held in Houston, Texas. Later that month, Mattiq’s high-throughput experimentation team leader, Dr. Jordan Swisher, delivered a presentation for the North American Catalysis Society. CEO Jeff Erhardt participated in an invite-only roundtable discussion hosted by McKinsey & Company that focused on tackling the decarbonization of hard-to-abate industrial sectors during New York Climate Week in September.
Dr. Jordan Swisher and Mattiq’s head of product management, Dr. Michael Ashley, hosted two webinars this year. In April, the experts discussed solutions to the operational benefits of electrochemistry compared to status quo, thermal chemistry. In October, they presented advances in electrochemistry that will enable the profitable decarbonization of chemicals.
Our crowning accomplishment of 2023 was the development of a portfolio of novel, highly durable alternatives to iridium oxide (for water electrolyzers to produce green hydrogen) that meet or exceed its performance, but with a much lower cost and greater availability. This work represents the most comprehensive, systematic study of the landscape of iridium alternatives that has ever been conducted, having evaluated millions of combinations of different elements for durability, efficacy, and practicality for industrial applications.
Our announcement received national recognition for its potential to accelerate the green hydrogen industry in publications such as IEEE Spectrum, Engineering.com, Cleantechnica, and more. We also worked with Heraeus Precious Metals this year to verify the performance of a new ruthenium-based catalyst for PEM water electrolysis.
We’re in discussions with a number of industrial partners to commercialize and bring our iridium alternatives to market, and have received a tremendous amount of interest. But our work solving the iridium challenge is just the first step in our mission to decarbonize the chemicals, fuels, and plastics that power our world.
We will make significant strides over the next year to develop electrochemical solutions that produce clean chemicals, enabling significant emission reductions in the “hard-to-abate” chemicals sector. We look forward to continuing our work with industrial partners to bring these solutions to scale.