Image credit: Scimplify. Every smartphone, solar panel and guided munition on Earth depends on a handful of ultra-pure chemicals and critical materials — and for most of them, the world still relies overwhelmingly on one country: China. A three-year-old startup from Bengaluru is betting it can break that dependence not by building giant factories, but by orchestrating hundreds of existing ones with artificial intelligence. Scimplify, founded in 2023, has just raised $25 million in a strategic round led by Hitachi Ventures, and some of the cheque-writers are its own customers — German chemicals giant Henkel and US materials maker Teknor Apex are joining as investors for the first time.
What Scimplify actually does
Scimplify is not a chemical manufacturer in the traditional sense. The company runs a platform called SciNode — an agentic AI system that connects research, process development, process control and physical manufacturing. Here is how the model works: a customer brings a specification for a specialty chemical or critical material, and Scimplify’s scientists — the company says it has 600-plus scientists and advisors across disciplines — develop the synthesis route in R&D labs in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. SciNode’s AI agents then match that process to one of more than 500 pre-audited manufacturing partners, roughly 90 per cent of them in India, handling production planning, quality control, regulatory compliance and documentation across the network.
The engineering argument is about speed and capital. Building a dedicated plant for every new specialty chemical is slow and often leaves capacity idle — excess capacity alongside supply shortages, as co-founder Sachin Santhosh put it. By keeping the science in-house and the manufacturing distributed across a vetted network, Scimplify says it has, in some cases, gone from a customer’s requirement to delivering finished material in about two months — work the company says would typically take 12 to 18 months. Whether that timeline holds across chemistries is a fair question, but the model itself is a genuine attempt to fix the bottleneck that AI and computational tools have not: not discovering new materials, but turning promising chemistry into qualified, scaled production.
The $25 million bet
The round, announced on 14 October 2026 and reported by TechCrunch, is all-equity and was led by Hitachi Ventures, the venture arm of Japan’s Hitachi Group. Joining as new investors were two of Scimplify’s own customers — Henkel and Teknor Apex — alongside an undisclosed Japanese chemical company. Existing backers Accel India, Bertelsmann India Investments, Omnivore and 3one4 Capital also participated.
The financials tell a growth story that is unusually fast for industrial chemistry. The company says total equity funding now stands at $80 million. A person familiar with the transaction put the post-money valuation at about $250 million — up from roughly $150 million after the company’s $40 million Series B in March 2025 — though the company declined to confirm the valuation. The capital will go towards expanding research, processing and manufacturing capabilities in rare earth and critical metals purification, scaling the company’s semiconductor chemicals and battery chemicals businesses, and further development of SciNode.
Why critical materials, why now
The strategic context is hard to overstate. Washington’s CHIPS and Science Act and recent US defence directives have pushed electronics and defence contractors to eliminate single-country dependencies for advanced precursors — and China dominates exactly the materials Scimplify is targeting: rare earth oxides and chlorides, critical metals, advanced fluorination and hydrogenation chemistries, and electronic-grade solvents and etchants.
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Scimplify’s site lists rare earths and critical metals processing alongside ultra-high-purity chemicals for next-generation semiconductors, energy storage, photovoltaics and defence as its core advanced-materials offering. The company is already working on tungsten derivatives produced from scrap — an alternative source for a material whose supply is heavily concentrated in China — and on rare earth materials, another deeply China-dependent category, according to TechCrunch. Its customer list reads like a directory of industrial chemistry: Henkel, Coromandel, Dr Reddy’s, Coherent, Holcim, BASF, Sanyo, Marubeni, TDK and Solvay.
The company behind the platform
Scimplify — legally Cocreate Global Technologies Private Limited, based in HSR Layout, Bengaluru — was founded in 2023 by Sachin Santhosh, Salil Srivastava, Dheeraj Dhingra and Hersh Manek, founders who had previously spent a decade connecting Indian factories to global customers. The growth numbers the company reports are striking: more than 1,000 customers across 40-plus countries, up from 600 customers in 16 countries about 18 months ago, per Accel. Co-founder Sachin Santhosh told TechCrunch the company has reached an annualised revenue run rate of about $200 million, roughly triple a year earlier, with the US accounting for about $60 million of it; energy, electronics and defence now make up 45 to 50 per cent of revenue, up from under 15 per cent a year ago. The company also says it has been EBITDA-positive for the past two months and expects to turn profitable after tax this month.
Scimplify plans to deploy roughly $7.5 million of the new capital on US expansion — building out its manufacturing network there — and about $2 million on further SciNode development. The company employs around 340 people, roughly 70 of them scientists, with most staff in India and local teams in the US, Japan, Indonesia and the UAE.
The caveats that matter
Two calibrations are essential. First, the headline commercial numbers — the $200 million run rate, the path to post-tax profitability, the two-month spec-to-delivery timelines — are the company’s own figures and have not been independently verified. The $250 million valuation comes from a person familiar with the deal, not the company. Second, the asset-light model that makes Scimplify fast also makes it dependent: coordinating 500-plus partner factories for ultra-high-purity, defence-grade and semiconductor-grade materials means quality control is the business, and any inconsistency at the network’s edges becomes Scimplify’s problem. Finally, with energy, electronics and defence now approaching half of revenue, the company is riding powerful geopolitical tailwinds — demand from AI infrastructure and defence — that can cut both ways if those budgets turn.
Why this one is worth watching
Strip away the caveats and the thesis is concrete: the hardest problem in industrial chemistry is not the molecule, it is the qualified supply chain, and Scimplify has built a working machine — in-house science, agentic AI orchestration, and a 500-plant Indian manufacturing network — that attacks exactly that problem. Hitachi Ventures leading the round, with industrial customers putting their own money in, suggests the people who buy these materials believe the model works. If Scimplify can convert its rare-earth and semiconductor-chemical ambitions into actual at-scale, non-China supply, it will not just be a fast-growing startup — it will be a piece of the industrial resilience that governments in Washington, Tokyo and New Delhi are all now paying for.
