#91 - Ahmed Ismail - Dunia - Where AI meets material discovery

#91 - Ahmed Ismail - Dunia - Where AI meets material discovery

From New Wave. by Hugo Rauch

May 5, 2026 · 1h 21m

About this episode

The episode discusses the intersection of AI and materials discovery with Ahmed Ismail from Dunia, focusing on the challenges and innovations in the field.

Subscribe to the newsletter: New Wave | Hugo Rauch | Substack **** 🌊 When AI hits the atom Why the future of materials discovery won’t be built on simulations alone. We’re joined by Ahmed Ismail , Co-founder & COO of Dunia , a Berlin-based deeptech company building AI- and robotics-powered systems to accelerate the discovery and scale-up of industrial breakthrough materials. In this episode, we dive into one of the biggest bottlenecks in climate and industrial innovation: materials discovery, and unpack why the real opportunity is not just asking AI to invent new formulas, but building the physical infrastructure to test, validate, and scale them. In our conversation, we covered: → Why so many scientific breakthroughs still depend on serendipity — and how AI might increase the frequency of those “lucky” moments. → The difference between AI-generated materials, simulation-first approaches, and autonomous industrial labs. → Why the sim-to-real gap is the central challenge in AI for materials: what looks perfect on a computer often fails in a reactor. → How Dunia built IRIS, an autonomous industrial lab designed to generate high-quality, device-level data for real-world…

People in this episode

Host: Hugo Rauch

Guest: Ahmed Ismail

Topics covered

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Dunia, New Wave

Places: Berlin

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