Radical AI’s Joseph Krause: The Scientist Building The ‘Waymo’ Lab For New Materials
The New York-based founder joins The Upstart Podcast to talk about SpaceX, why cloud labs failed, and why you don't need $1B to speed up 150 years of stagnant materials science.
Materials science hasn’t changed much in 150 years. Enter Radical AI CEO Joseph Krause.
In a big new lab in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, the startup founder is building a “next-gen” approach that he says makes other autonomous labs look like hand-free driving mode on a car, compared to a fully self-driving Waymo.
It’s an approach that plenty of corporate scientists tell Krause must be too good to be true. “How could you really discover more alloys in a week than we have discovered in our company history?” he says they ask.
But since its founding in 2024, Radical AI has already produced valuable, and secret, alloys for customers, Krause insists. And the startup has done it after raising just $55 million in its last funding round, not the $1 billion of certain well-heeled competitors.
We’ve written about other material science startups at Upstarts already, including our scoop of Apple’s former AI chief joining CuspAI. Another, Periodic Labs, was reported by Forbes to be raising $500 million at a valuation of $7.5 billion in May. Radical AI stands out not just because it’s based in New York, but because it’s arguably the only startup that isn’t outsourcing the actual lab work to partners.
Krause is also a straight shooting, no-nonsense founder who makes for a lively interview. Will he ‘win’ this category when DeepMind alumni, Jeff Bezos and others can also raise huge sums? It’s hard to definitively say. But it’s easy to see Radical AI competing, and thriving, in this fast-evolving category.
On The Upstarts Podcast, Krause explains how a SpaceX breakthrough helped kick off a category; why cloud labs and deep tech companies often fail; and why concurrent engineering is as important as next-gen lab equipment itself.
Plus, he shares his Upstart Moment: a 100-year-vision to become one of the world’s most important companies.
“When we put a civilization on Mars, the habitat that they’re living in will be made with Radical materials.”
Our three biggest takeaways for busy builders can be found below.
Look for ‘something more’
Embrace resource pressure
Stick to your guns
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Look for ‘something more’
Krause was in a PhD program and working as a fellow at the U.S. Army Research Lab when he cold-emailed 100 VCs about in New York about working with them to invest in materials science.
Kevin Ryan, the serial entrepreneur and AlleyCorp founder, offered him an internship.
“This AI wave was taking off, everyone was investing, and there was pressure to deploy dollars in really exciting companies that are going to be the big companies of the future. “
Reviewing AI pitches with one of his Radical AI co-founders, Jorge Colindres, that Krause got the idea for Radical — out of frustration.
“We were just like, ‘How many more recruiting pitches can we get to ‘redefine the recruiting industry,’ right? I'm sure it's a good problem. Nothing against those businesses, but we were looking for something more.”
They thought about ideas in materials, robotics, manufacturing, and physical industry, but materials science seemed the best chance to have a “fundamental impact” on humanity.
“Regardless of what industry you care about, automotive and aerospace, manufacturing and defense, climate, energy, semiconductors, electronics, the most important industries in the world are all a direct result from materials R&D.
So to us, it felt like the perfect blend where you have this technology that is completely changing the paradigm in discovery, and you have this field that's 100-something years old and hasn't had it happen yet. That's a place that we should attack.”
Embrace resource pressure
Radical AI’s most recent funding round, a $55 million seed announced a year ago from RTX Ventures, Nvidia, AlleyCorp and others, seems quaint compared to some of the billion-dollar raises for pre-launch companies in AI.
When I mention this to Krause, he first stresses that Radical AI’s competitive edge doesn’t come from automating tools, or navigating a robotic arm, but from the interdisciplinary team of scientists he’s put together to run such experiments, capture the results, and build AI systems for analyzing them on top.
“The connection and the collaboration between all of those units is imperative. It is not impossible — we did it — but it takes serious time to really build it. You cannot get interdisciplinary work unless you build interdisciplinary products. So the timeline to even just catch up to us is two, three years, and we are compounding that more and more, the more technology we build on top of it.”
Still, I ask Krause straight-up: if he could have raised $1 billion to start, would he really have turned it down?
“ I think it's dishonest to say that more money is not helpful. It is,” he replied.
Money means hiring faster, bigger facilities, and more data collection.
“In the material science space, we do not have experimental data sets, and so the more experiments you can run, the larger the data set gets, so the better the AI models perform. The number of experiments you could run is correlated to the amount of capital you have, because of the tools that you can buy.
So more money's helpful, but you do not need a billion dollars to start this. As a matter of fact, we didn't have a billion dollars, as you know, and yet we've still proven the self-driving lab works.”
Krause says he doesn’t want a billion dollars today, because he doesn’t need it, and it keeps his team focused.
“I'm a big, big believer as an entrepreneur in ‘back against the wall.’ When you get comfortable is where great ideas go to die, because you have no incentive and no chip on your shoulder to execute.”
In the future, Radical AI will likely need $1 billion, and it will raise it. But for now, it would be a distraction, says the CEO.
”Having pressure to deliver is a very healthy thing.”
Stick to your guns
At this point in Radical AI’s journey, Krause says he and his team are confident that they’ve found the “correct way” to build in materials science. It will take time for the market to agree, however, in what he calls Radical’s “capital-efficient, but very directed, approach.”
“We don't want to boil the ocean in materials science, because you'll never drive any value, and then you'll never prove the system drives value.
So for us, now it's about sticking to your guns, not being persuaded by VCs, by the market, or even by what talent is telling you. Staying true to the mission, true to the execution plan, and driving against that.”
According to Krause, this is a particular challenge for deep tech companies, specifically.
“They go to market, they hit a wall, and then they quickly try to start moving around that wall with a lot of input from the outside world.
Not at all do I think you shouldn't pay attention to what customers or what people are saying. I think you can't be influenced by what people are saying, either, particularly if you are confident you're right. It is making the bet that you are right that typically pays off in the long run.”