No matter if it’s the pharmaceutical industry, specialty chemicals or the perfume industry – they all face the same challenge every day: the identification of (unknown) substances. The related question “Which molecules are in my sample?” spans all areas of chemistry with the problem of compound identification being ubiquitous.
Does the sample really only contain the desired substances? And if not, are any impurities present admissible? Complex devices such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometers (GC-MS) are used to analyze these samples. However, these machines do not yield desired molecular structures directly, but complex spectrometric data. Since this data is highly convoluted – thereby challenging to be interpreted – today only one strategy exists for structure elucidation: Manual interpretation by trained chemistry experts. Even for them, these analyses take hours or days and due to rising personnel cost and scarcity they come with a price tag between €1,000 and €10,000 – for just a single sample.
To tackle this challenge, ChemInnovation develops chemically inspired AI models and specific cheminformatics algorithms. The team convolutes this basis into smart AI-Software for analytical chemical applications with the focus being on the evaluation of spectrometric data, and in particular on automating structure elucidation. Their first product, which was developed at the University of Münster as part of an EXIST research transfer, is METIS (Molecules from ElecTron Ionization Spectra). With the software, data can be analyzed fully automatically in <5 min.
This speeds up the evaluation process by a factor of x5 to x20, while 50% to 200% more molecular structures can be elucidated. While yielding the same or a higher quality of results, its use requires significantly less expertise to be used, especially compared to manual competitor software. The underlying algorithms have been developed in such a way that the software works reliably in a particularly wide range of applications, i.e. regardless of the exact questions and underlying chemistry
METIS is available as a cloud solution via Microsoft Azure, which ensures performance and allows updates to be carried out continuously. Two license models have been implemented to meet the needs of different customers. Either a subscription license for 12 000 €/year or a pay-per-use model with prices of 90 €/chromatogram can be selected. This is offset by low operating costs of €100 to €200/month per fully connected GC-MS at highest utilization or 10 to 50 cents per processed data point. Accordingly, high margins and recurring income can be generated steadily to finance continuous R&D as well as the development of additional software solutions.
Sales of the software are currently and in the coming years will be based on personal and selective contact with suitable customers. To this end, a clear customer journey from initial contact to pre-qualification and qualification has been developed and tested. This has already proven successful with over 200 contacts already being qualified via LinkedIn, at trade fairs as well as through customers’ job postings. All customers have a GC-MS, sufficient sample throughput, targeted pain points as well as openness towards AI-technologies.
This is of particular relevance, as, due to the technological novelty of METIS, significant customer education and tests have to be carried out before the contract can be concluded. This is resulting in significant time costs for customer acquisition, which ChemInnovation reduces by pricing initial demo evaluations and smaller software adaptations (pilot studies) at daily rates of € 1,500. In this way, the costs of acquisition can be reduced to < €2 000 per new customer. Therefore and depending on the selected pricing model, a profit is achieved after 2 to 5 months, allowing the selected business model to grow organically at an exceptional rate. So far, three customer projects with a total turnover of € 26,500 have been conducted while the first licenses have been sold for ~€ 12.000 each. Initial sales via the pay-per-use model are expected this year.
Thanks to the unique technology and the major benefits offered by METIS, ChemInnovation builds on a particularly scalable and profitable business model. It is expected that the business model will be fully self-sustaining from the end of 2026 and that >70% of revenue can be reinvested in research and development as well as in scaling the sales process. At this point, additional capital is to be raised, e.g. in the form of venture capital, to expand sales and ChemInnovation internationally. ChemInnovation’s long-term goal is to revolutionize data evaluation in analytical chemistry, thereby becoming the international market and technology leader for mass spectrometry software.