巴斯夫，杀入AI for Science！这一百亿级风口赛道爆了！

TL;DR - Chemical giant BASF is deploying Orbital Industries' multi-agent AI materials platform CurieOS in its Environmental Catalysts and Metals Solutions division, starting with automotive emissions catalysts — a concrete enterprise adoption signal for the fast-growing AI-for-materials market.

• CurieOS is a multi-agent system directed by goal-oriented, multi-step instructions: it surveys scientific literature, analyzes experimental data, and runs simulations to generate new hypotheses; it was previously used to design a PFAS-free cooling material.
• Orbital's core engine, Orb, simulates atomic quantum-mechanical behavior and is claimed to handle 100,000 atoms on a single GPU at ~10x the speed of the nearest alternative, outperforming models from Microsoft, Meta, and leading academic labs. A version trained on public data was open-sourced in 2024 (github.com/orbital-materials/orb-models); commercial work uses a proprietary-data version.
• Founded 2022 by ex-DeepMind researcher Jonathan Godwin, the company raised a $50M Series B in May led by Plural with repeat participation from NVIDIA's NVentures; it screened hundreds of thousands of candidate molecules to produce a PFAS-free liquid coolant slated to ship alongside next-gen GPUs in 2027, plus a modular data center product deployable in six months versus three years.
• Market context: AI materials R&D was ~$2B in 2025 with forecasts of $17.9B by 2034; direct competitors include CuspAI ($100M) and Periodic Labs ($300M seed). Godwin argues materials reach market faster than AI-designed drugs since they skip clinical trials.