Theia Ventures Leads Pre-Seed Round in Novyte Materials to Accelerate Collaborative Materials Discovery

Theia Ventures, India’s specialist early stage fund focused on AI, deeptech, energy transition, and decarbonization, today announced that it has led a pre seed investment in Novyte Materials, an emerging AI material discovery company. This round also saw participation from Sandesh Paturi (Co-Founder, Venwiz) and Niharika Jain (Director, Chemvera) investors. This fund will support Novyte’s AI platform development and early pilots to accelerate the co-creation and collaborative discovery of new materials. The investment reinforces Theia’s commitment to backing transformative technologies that enable sustainable material innovation and next generation decarbonization aligned discovery.

 

Ajaz Khan, Founder and CEO, Novyte Materials

 

The process of discovering new materials remains one of the slowest and most resource intensive parts of innovation. Traditional development takes years, often decades, driven by extensive trial and error, fragmented experimentation, isolated lab data, and disconnected handoffs between computational prediction and real world validation. This slows progress across sectors that urgently need next generation materials for better performance, reliability, and sustainability.

 

Novyte is addressing this challenge with AI driven materials discovery that cuts R&D time by up to 10x and can reduce early stage physical testing costs by as much as 90%. Its generative AI system designs, validates, and reverse engineers novel materials using physics based simulations, supporting applications across composite materials, aerospace, advanced manufacturing and specialty chemicals.

 

As industries push toward cleaner energy, advanced manufacturing, and high performance systems, materials science has become the quiet force behind many breakthrough technologies. From advanced batteries and hypersonic flight to nuclear fusion and low loss transformers, the pace of progress is shaped by how quickly and accurately new stable materials can be designed and validated.

 

“As AI becomes foundational infrastructure for every industry, Novyte is bringing that transformation to materials discovery. Their system replaces years of lab work with intelligent AI-led design and real-time validation. We believe this will accelerate innovation across energy, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing,” – Priya Shah, Founder & GP – Theia Ventures.

 

“Innovation is currently capped by the physical limits of yesterday’s materials. Novyte removes that ceiling. By decoding complex chemical interactions with AI, we are turning the search for new materials into a predictable, scalable engineering process,” – Ajaz Khan, Founder & CEO – Novyte Materials.

 

Novyte is redefining materials engineering by fusing the precision of wet lab experimentation with the predictive power of dry lab modeling.

 

By working directly alongside R&D teams, decoding complex material interactions to engineer custom solutions, eliminates the guesswork of traditional discovery. The vertically integrated approach bridges the gap between testing and commercialization, replacing costly trial-and-error with predictable, validated pathways. The result is a continuously learning system purpose-built for applied industrial chemistry, creating a scalable foundation for reliable material discovery.

 

Novyte is incubated at ICT-NICE, the innovation and entrepreneurship hub of the Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, and works closely with ICT’s research ecosystem while building its own dedicated R&D infrastructure, and synthesis lab.

 

Novyte will initially partner with specialty chemicals industries, polymers, paints, adhesives, and coatings that are advancing in their journey to identify alternative materials with improved features and performance. The company aims to reduce operational and R&D costs, shorten development timelines, and accelerate material discovery while ensuring that validation and scale are more predictable. The goal is to make the journey from lab to commercialisation seamless and achievable. The company is currently inviting collaborations and strategic partnerships.

 

This is Theia Ventures’ fourth investment from its new fund, which announced its first close anchored by British International Investment in October 2025. The fund counts Sarla Aviation (an electric aircraft company), Climitra Carbon (a biochar company catering to the steel industry) and Lemnisca (a bio-manufacturing company) as its first three investments, and the fund has committed to a few additional investments to be deployed within this financial year.