Undisclosed · Other round · AI · Menlo Park, California, US
Atinary Technologies, a developer of AI software for automated laboratory research, has received an undisclosed minority investment from Bruker alongside an expanded strategic collaboration. Bruker's announcement says the companies will connect Atinary's SDLabs platform with Chemspeed laboratory automation, Bruker analytical instruments and SciY scientific software. Neither party disclosed a use-of-funds plan.
The investor is also part of the product stack
Atinary sells a code-free platform that uses AI agents and machine learning to choose experiments, send instructions to laboratory equipment, analyse results and recommend the next experiment. The aim is a closed Design-Make-Test-Analyze-Learn loop in which physical results continuously inform the software, rather than separating computational predictions from laboratory validation.
The Bruker relationship matters because making that loop work requires more than an optimisation model. Customers need automation that can execute a protocol, instruments that can measure the result and software that can move data between each stage. Bruker owns Chemspeed and says the integration will combine those components with Atinary's workflow layer. The companies have already established a demonstration laboratory at Chemspeed's headquarters near Basel, while Atinary opened a Boston self-driving lab in early 2026.
That makes the investment partly a commercial integration bet. A pre-connected hardware and software stack can reduce the engineering work required for each deployment and give Bruker's instrument customers a clearer route into closed-loop experimentation. The test is whether the companies can turn their demonstration environments into repeatable customer installations across the additional applications Bruker says it intends to pursue.
Evidence from closed-loop experiments
Atinary has published evidence from a collaboration with IBM Research Europe. Its use-case report says SDLabs and IBM's RoboRXN explored a space of 12,036 possible combinations and achieved more than 80% conversion for four reactants using 25 distinct reactions. The result is specific to that chemistry experiment, but it illustrates the commercial promise: reducing the number of physical runs needed to find useful conditions can save laboratory time and materials.
The company previously raised a $5m Seed round in September 2023 from AgFunder and Cherubic Ventures. The new transaction is different: Bruker is both a minority investor and a supplier of components inside the proposed workflow. Financial terms remain undisclosed, so the clearest milestone is not capital deployment but whether the partnership expands from shared labs into customer use.
Explore this theme
Martin Schilling, Deep Tech Momentum: Why Europe's deep tech problem isn't funding — Martin Schilling & Deep Tech Momentum, hosted on EUVC · 4 March 2026. The piece argues that corporate buyers and integration paths are essential to commercialising deep technology, the same question raised by Bruker's investment and product collaboration with Atinary.
Sources checked:
Bruker investor announcement · Atinary company announcement · Atinary / IBM Research Europe use case · Atinary 2023 funding announcement · Tech.eu Funding Explorer
Image: Bruker Corporation, via Bruker newsroom.
