Altara secures $7M to address data gaps slowing physical science

Companies that work in batteries, semiconductors, and medical devices generate a lot of data — and that information can be scattered across spreadsheets and input systems, making it difficult to use to improve products or understand failures.

The beginning of San Francisco altarwhich just raised $7 million in seed funding, says it has built an AI layer to bridge these data gaps and bring fragmented technical knowledge to a single platform. The round was led by Greylock, with participation from Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Jeff Dean.

Altara was founded in 2025 by Eva Tuecke (pictured right), who previously conducted particle physics research at Fermilab and worked at SpaceX; and Catherine Yeo (pictured left), former AI engineer at Warp. The two met while studying computer science at Harvard University.

“Imagine if you’re a company building next-generation batteries, and the battery fails a cell test in the R&D process,” Yeo said. “The engineering team has to go in and manually look at a lot of data sources, everything from their sensor systems to their temperature, humidity information.

Scientists and engineers often spend weeks or months on this “hunting” of data to identify and resolve failures, he said.

Altara says its AI dramatically cuts the time required for this process, reducing weeks of processing to minutes.

Corinne Riley, a partner at Greylock, compares Altara’s efforts in the physical sciences to the role of trusted experts in the world of software. If the plan fails, “SRE will step in, and they will look at the company’s perspective,” he said. “Someone pushed a code change, and that’s what caused the problem.”

For example, Greylock-backed Resolve, which is expensive $1.5 billionthey use AI to detect software failures. Altara’s vision is to act like an analog device, knowing exactly what went wrong when a battery or semiconductor fails to perform.

Altara is not the only pioneer in using AI to advance development in the physical sciences. Basics like Periodic Labs and Radical AI they are also fighting scientific research from the beginning.

Altara is taking a different, more cost-effective approach. Instead of trying to change the decades-old research and development industry, Altara offers an intelligent platform that connects existing information.

In fact, Greylock’s Riley sees physical science AI as “the next big frontier” and predicts an explosion of development in the field.