Interview With Citrine Informatics: AI, Data, And The Future Of Materials Science

Founded in 2013, Citrine Informatics has grown into one of the leading players in materials informatics, helping companies harness AI and data science to accelerate the design, discovery, and optimization of advanced materials. We sat down with the company's CEO and co-founder, Greg Mulholland, to explore how it all started, what makes Citrine unique, and where the field is heading.

From Excel Sheets to AI for Materials

When the company was founded, the materials informatics space looked very different.

After completing studies at Cambridge, Greg joined a small semiconductor company in North Carolina. It quickly became apparent just how limited toolsets for handling data were at the time. "We were using big Excel sheets, and that seemed to be the norm," he recalls. While density functional theory (DFT) was gaining momentum in computational chemistry and materials research around 2008–2009, it wasn't always solving the kind of real-world experimental problems