New capabilities help product development teams move from product goals to suggested experiments in minutes, with stronger predictive models behind the workflow
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., July 7, 2026: Citrine Informatics, the proven AI platform for materials and chemistry product development, today announced the launch of Catalyst and Apex, two new capabilities designed to help product development teams make better experimental decisions faster.
The bottleneck in materials AI is no longer whether AI can work. Citrine customers already use the platform at scale, with 550 AI models deployed each month, 380 projects worked each month, and 70,000 experiment suggestions generated each month. The next bottleneck is adoption: helping more scientists create AI workflows quickly, understand why recommendations are being made, and trust the next experiment enough to act.
Catalyst and Apex address that challenge together. Catalyst lowers the barrier to creating and using AI workflows. Apex raises the quality of the models behind them.
“Materials and chemicals teams are under pressure to reformulate faster, respond to supply constraints, preserve institutional knowledge, and increase product development productivity,” said Greg Mulholland, CEO, Citrine Informatics. “Catalyst and Apex are designed for that reality. They help scientists move from product goals to suggested experiments faster, while keeping expert judgment central.”
Catalyst is Citrine’s AI workflow accelerator. A product developer can describe a product goal in their own language, and Catalyst reviews available data, creates a dataset, builds an AI model, sets a search space and target properties, and generates suggested next experiments in minutes.
Catalyst is built for scientific decision-making, not black-box automation. It explains the drivers of performance and the rationale behind suggested experiments in clear language, so scientists can review, challenge, and act on recommendations with confidence.
For product development teams, that means less time spent on setup, data wrangling, and workflow configuration. It also means faster onboarding for scientists who understand the product problem but do not want to write code, learn AI terminology, or manually tune a model before getting started.
Apex is Citrine’s next-generation predictive modeling layer for materials and chemicals product development. It deploys a suite of advanced model architectures and pre-trained chemical embeddings, then returns results from the model that performs best for the project.
Materials and chemicals problems vary widely. A high-dimensional formulation problem may need a different modeling approach than a process optimization. Apex is designed to select the strongest model for the task rather than relying on a single model type.
Apex uses model architectures including graph neural networks, transformers, and other advanced approaches. It also uses pre-trained chemical embeddings based on scientific literature and molecular data, giving models a stronger chemistry-aware starting point.
“Experienced scientists will always have an advantage,” said John Shaw, Chief Product Officer, Citrine Informatics. “Apex is designed to make that expertise go further. It gives teams a stronger starting point, reduces the need for manual model tuning, and helps more product developers take on complex projects with confidence.”
In internal Citrine benchmarks, raw Apex models, before model tuning or added expert configuration, performed as well as or better than current-platform expertly tuned models 95% of the time. On complex, high-dimensional, optimization problems, Apex has reduced the number of experiments required to reach target properties by up to 50%.
Together, Catalyst and Apex support three priorities for materials and chemicals companies: faster development cycles, accelerated AI adoption, and cross-team learning. Catalyst helps teams make AI workflows easier to create and understand. Apex improves the modeling layer behind those workflows. Together, they help product development teams move from product goal to defensible next experiment in minutes.
Citrine will unveil Catalyst and Apex in a public webinar on July 14, 2026.
Register here: https://info.citrine.io/from-lab-to-launch-faster
About Citrine Informatics
Citrine Informatics is the proven AI platform for materials and chemistry product development. Citrine customers use the platform to accelerate product development, optimize production and improve sales. The Citrine Platform is trusted by 10 of the top 20 specialty chemical companies and has generated hundreds of millions in documented customer value.
From lab to launch, faster.
Media Contacts
Hannah Melia
Head of Marketing
Citrine Informatics
h.melia@citrine.io