In the late 1970s, Kiwi chemist Alan MacDiarmid was attending a conference in Tokyo when he met Hideki Shirakawa during a coffee break. Shirakawa showed him a shiny, metallic-looking material that wasn’t actually metal. This chance encounter was the catalyst for their collaboration which led to the creation of conductive polymers—one of the most important material discoveries of modern chemistry. What started over a cup of coffee culminated in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. 

It’s a story of scientific serendipity that, Farid Miromehseni argues, also exposes what’s broken in chemistry.

“If they hadn’t met at that coffee break at that conference, we wouldn’t have flexible sensors, biosensors or LEDs,” says Farid. 

Farid’s mission at Kimia is to remove that kind of randomness from scientific discovery. 

“Discovery will become about access to intelligence, rather than randomness,” says Farid. “We’re building chemical intelligence and if we succeed at doing that, I believe every chemist will have a shot at creating something worthy of a Nobel Prize.”

We sat down with Farid, the Co-founder and CEO of Kimia, to understand how he plans to build chemical intelligence, why an industry that’s operated the same way for a century is ready to change and what a chemically abundant world looks like. 

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The industry that time forgot

Farid grew up in a household where the dinner table conversation revolved around chemistry. His mother was a biochemist and his father did his PhD with Alan MacDiarmid at the University of Wollongong. The Nobel Prize story was part of the household conversation, not inspirational folklore.

What struck Farid, as he eventually followed his parents into chemistry and completed his own PhD in chemical engineering, was how little things had changed over time. 

“A lot of that process hasn’t changed in the past hundred years,” says Farid. “It’s still very manual. There’s a lot of pen and paper and excel sheets.”

The chemical industry is opaque by design. There are logical reasons why they haven’t gone digital, but it’s created a mess that’s tricky to fix. 

First, there’s a security mindset. Chemical companies have historically guarded their formulations, even though, as Farid points out, the threat is largely imagined. “The chemical industry is one of very few industries where reverse engineering is really not a threat,” says Farid. “You can’t put a gallon of paint in a machine and understand exactly what the formula is.”

Second, there’s a fragmentation problem. The chemical industry is made up of hundreds of industries. The attributes that matter for car bumpers are completely different from those that matter for a lipstick, which are different again from battery materials. 

Finally, there’s no universal language. “It’s an apples-and-oranges situation,” says Farid, where similar attributes are described differently with no shared taxonomy in the industry.

The result is an industry where critical knowledge lives in the minds of veteran chemists, buried in PDF documents and scattered across millions of academic papers published each year. And none of these knowledge bases are talking to each other. 

“There could be two people across the world working on a very similar project for years and years and they never know about each other,” says Farid. As a result, products take longer to develop, cost more than they should and contain more ingredients than necessary. That inefficiency has made toxicity and sustainability pressing concerns. 

The situation is about to get worse. 40% of the industry is approaching retirement and people like Farid’s father, who have decades of tacit knowledge, are leaving without a system to capture what they know. 

This is the industry Farid is trying to transform by building intelligence that can model and understand its complexity. 

Building chemical intelligence

So, what exactly is chemical intelligence? Farid describes it as a system capable of understanding, reasoning about and optimising the entire lifecycle of chemical products, from initial discovery through manufacturing, regulation, sales and sustainability. 

It’s an ambitious vision, but its success can be framed plainly: “If we succeed at building chemical intelligence, every chemist will have a shot at creating something worthy of a Nobel prize.” 

Getting there requires Farid and the team to build out four distinct pillars. 

1. Cataloguing the world of chemicals
   Creating a comprehensive database of raw materials, patents, journals and existing formulations that are currently fragmented across companies, academia and individual expertise.
2. Going beyond retrieval to understand reasoning
   “It’s not just about answer engines,” says Farid, “It’s about understanding why chemists make certain decisions as it relates to these ingredients.” 
3. Building tools that solve complete problems
   The industry needs end-to-end solutions rather than productivity aids to make intelligence operational. 
4. Scaling comprehension through validation
   “Chemistry is real. It’s beyond simulation and imagining things,” says Farid. This means closing the feedback loop through testing to validate the data. 

While many would start with R&D to solve this problem, Kimia is beginning at the opposite end of the spectrum. 

Why start at the end?

For someone with a PhD in chemical engineering and a passion for R&D, Farid made the counterintuitive choice not to start Kimia in the lab. 

The chemical industry operates as a triad of manufacturers who invent, distributors who enable and buyers who engineer materials into products. R&D sits at the beginning of this chain, whereas Kimia is starting at the end with the commercial problems in sales and distribution. 

“Rather than trying to build a system that knows everything about everything and a massive amount of capital is needed to create a horizontal platform,” Farid explains, “we believe it’s much more efficient to start with specific commercial problems in mind.”

The goal is to build a data flywheel. Create tools that salespeople and commercial teams will use to generate proprietary data about what works in the real world. That data makes the tools smarter. In turn, it earns access to more data, enabling Kimia to work backwards toward R&D with a genuine understanding of the full context. 

“When you start with R&D, you miss all of this because it’s all about simulation and moving pixels on a screen,” says Farid. You could end up designing materials that are theoretically perfect, but fail in practice because they’re too expensive, can’t clear regulatory hurdles or don’t fit into existing manufacturing practices. 

In practice, this means Kimia operates like a forward-deployed engineering team by embedding within enterprise customers to understand their specific data models, building custom ontologies that make sense for their industry and becoming an extension of their operations. These are companies making hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, many still operating on Excel and paper. “There’s a lot of room to help them grow,” says Farid. 

The problems they’re solving might sound mundane, like helping a salesperson find a specific resin in a 5,000-SKU catalogue. That search currently takes days or weeks, but by bringing in chemical intelligence, you can apply it and solve it in an instant. 

Solving commercial problems is just the foundation. Farid’s vision for chemical intelligence goes beyond making existing workflows faster to changing what’s possible to create.

The path to chemical abundance

Farid describes the end goal as a “chemically abundant world”. 

At an individual level, that looks something like a 3D printer in your home, but for chemistry. “You can make your favourite products, like a toothbrush or shampoo, exactly the way you want.” Whether it’s a face cream formulated for your skin type or cleaning products tailored to your home’s surfaces, these products would be 10 times cheaper and way less toxic than what you can buy today. 

The vision is just as compelling at the infrastructure level. Cities with roads that last hundreds of years instead of requiring constant repair and construction materials designed from first principles rather than selected from what happens to exist.

“We can start imagining how we want to build cities,” says Farid. “We can say, hey, what’s a problem we want to solve and what is something we don’t have that we can build now?”. 

The economic impacts for a country like Australia are particularly relevant. “If things cost 10 times less and could be built 10 times faster, that will have a massive impact on the cost required to run manufacturing,” says Farid. “Things that aren’t feasible right now will become feasible.”

Farid describes this as a shift from a world constrained by what materials happen to exist and what discoveries happen to occur, to a world where you start with the problem and work backward to the optimal solution. 

It’s an ambitious vision but for Farid, it’s also inevitable and deeply personal. 

What’s in a name?

In Persian, Kimia means “chemistry”, but its roots trace back to alchemy; the practice of turning something ordinary into something extraordinary. “When I think about the mission of Kimia, I couldn’t think of a better word to reflect this messy, unpredictable, beautiful science and transform it into something that’s more programmable and intelligent,” says Farid. 

It’s a mission that’s deeply ingrained in Farid as he watched the chemical industry from the inside as he grew up, seeing both its potential and its inefficiencies. “I’m part of this story,” says Farid. “I feel a responsibility to continue this journey.”

What excites him most isn’t just the productivity gains or cost reductions, it’s what chemical intelligence frees humans to do. With AI handling reasoning and robots doing the manual work, humans can focus on creativity. “We become the minds that find the problems that are interesting to solve and think about what can be built that we previously didn’t have the option to even think about.”

What his father’s generation achieved through serendipitous coffee break conversations and laboratory accidents, Farid wants to make accessible through intelligence, so that any chemist, anywhere in the world has the tools to see what’s possible.