Insights for Success from a World-Changing AI Startup
episode
Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
31 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 15 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is Radical AI and why did they raise a $55 M seed round?
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you'll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Welcome to Startup Success. Today I have Joseph Kraus in studio. Joseph is the co-founder and CEO of Radical AI, and Radical AI has raised $55 million in their seed plus round, which tells you they're up to something very exciting. They're working on materials development through RD AI. Joseph's gonna get into to it. I'm so excited to have you here. Welcome, Joseph.
Thanks so much, Kate. Thank you for having me. Big fan about what you've been working on and excited to dive into all things radical AI.
Yes, I am too. Your background is so different from a typical founder. Can we talk about that for a moment? And if you can just kind of walk us through it and how you got here, that would be, I think, really helpful to set the stage.
Absolutely. I love talking about the background, not because of me, because I think it really demonstrates one of my favorite quotes in the world, which is Steve Jobs quote around you can never connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect the dots looking backwards. And my path to founding radical AI is a true reflection of that quote. So if we go way back, you start out, I was in graduate school, data right. University and I was working on discovering new advanced materials for the computing industry, semiconductor specifically. And I was going through this process and was getting super frustrated with academic research. Not because academic research is poor, but because I really was focused on how I could make an impact.
I wanted to take the stuff I was making in the lab and start to commercialize these things. And so So I ended up looking for opportunities to be able to do this. And I got a fellowship at the Army Research Lab, which is this corporate research lab. It's for the US Army. It's right outside of Washington, D.C. in Maryland. And there's thousands of scientists and graduate students there working on conducting fundamental RD, but with the objective of trying to commercialize these things in the future. Oh, interesting. And so I kind of took like one. step closer to okay how do we start to look at pushing some of this novel research out Naturally, as the entrepreneur I now am today, it still wasn't enough. And so I started thinking, okay, if it's not going to be here, I have to start a company.
I need to actually go commercialize my research. But I had no idea how to do that. And I had read every book and took every class online, but I really thought, look, I know I'm going to be inside tech. Let me see if I can find someone that I could learn from, that I could understand the way you can. Actually build a company as well as the ways to not build a company and then go forward from there. And so I had cold emailed a few people in New York, Kevin Ryan being one of them. He responded right away. And I actually told Kevin, if you're not investing in material science, you're not investing in the future. And he was like, That's a bold claim. I've been doing this for 30 years and I'm quite good at it.
Um I said, no, but I'd love to come show you what I mean. And so to Kevin's credit, he said, Come up to New York. York. Let's do a six month internship and we'll see how it goes. And that was, man, coming up on four years now since that time. So I took a leave of absence and joined Ali Corp, his venture firm. Leave of absence. Right. And was there for about two and a half years before rolling out and starting radical AI. And so there I did all material science and deep tech investing from semiconductors to 3D printing and and everything in between.
How did Joseph’s academic and Army Research Lab experience shape his startup vision?
And it was a really nice segue into actually forming and starting a company.
That's incredible. So did he kind of did you guide him on some of the investments based on your background?
Yeah, so Kevin is very good at letting experts be experts in what they are and really giving kind of a guiding perspective.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Radical AI and why did they raise a $55 M seed round?
0:01–3:39
2
How did Joseph’s academic and Army Research Lab experience shape his startup vision?
3:39–7:27
3
What motivated the founding of Radical AI and how did the three co‑founders meet?
7:27–11:40
4
Why are materials development bottlenecks critical for every industry?
11:40–15:49
5
How does Radical AI use AI‑driven “inverse design” to discover new materials?
15:49–19:30
6
What is the company’s “material flywheel” and how does the self‑driving lab close the data loop?
19:30–23:06
7
What culture principles and hiring practices keep Radical AI’s team mission‑driven?
23:06–27:08
8
What final advice does Joseph give founders about bias to action and rapid iteration?
27:08–31:17
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
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