Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer - AI… at ATUM Ventures · Singapore

The Venture

Discovering a better catalyst still runs on trial and error: form a hypothesis, synthesise a few candidates, test, repeat, for years, at a cost measured in millions. Most of the search space is never touched. It is one of the slowest, most expensive bottlenecks between the chemicals industry and a lower-carbon future.

We're building the company to change that. Spun out of A*STAR, our platform closes the loop between computation and the lab: machine learning proposes catalyst compositions worth making, simulation screens them, and an automated experimental workflow validates the winners, feeding every result back to sharpen the next cycle. It reaches candidates a traditional programme never would, in a fraction of the time and cost.

The beachhead is CO to methanol and green chemicals, where industry pull is real and the economics work. The core discovery IP is being licensed exclusively from A*STAR, with the inventor on board as an advisor. What the venture needs now is a founding chemical engineer to own the science and build the company around it.

The Role

You'll be the founding CSO. You'll own everything from the discovery campaign to a catalyst a customer can actually run in their process, taking a validated workflow and turning it into the engine of a real business. You'll work alongside a commercial co-founder (CEO), a computational co-founder (CTO) who owns the AI engine, a dedicated ATUM venture team, and the inventor-advisor.

Together, we'll:

• Direct the catalysis: which chemistries we pursue, how we design the discovery campaigns, how we read the results
• Own the licensed workflow IP and the automated experimental loop end to end
• Take candidates from prediction to a manufacturable, deployable catalyst, not a paper
• Sit across the table from chemical customers and turn their process problems into targets we can solve
• Build the lab foundation and the science team behind it

This is not a job. It's a founding journey where you share the risk, the upside, and the impact.

• A chemical engineer who thinks in reactors and scale-up: You hold a PhD in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, or Materials Science, with deep hands-on catalysis experience, and roughly 8 to 12 years turning chemistry into things that run in the real world. You know what a high-throughput experimental setup can and cannot tell you.
• Industry-tested: You've done this inside a chemicals or catalyst company's R&D (BASF, Johnson Matthey, Topsoe, Clariant, Honeywell UOP, Shell or ExxonMobil catalysis teams) or a deep-tech catalysis/materials startup. You care whether a catalyst is manufacturable and deployable, not whether it makes a good paper.
• Comfortable directing the AI, not running it: You won't write the models yourself, but you can steer a computation-and-ML-driven discovery loop and decide what to make and test next.
• A builder, not a career scientist: You want to run a company, not hold a senior title inside someone else's. You're ready to leave a stable role, take equity over salary, and own the outcome, and you're energised by conservative industrial buyers rather than put off by them.

Why Build With Us

• A hard problem worth owning: A real scientific and commercial challenge with a clear prize, and the science is yours to lead.
• A de-risked starting point: A validated workflow, exclusive A*STAR IP, an inventor handing over the know-how, and real industry pull. Not a blank page.
• Founder-led: You're a co-founder with a C-level seat and meaningful founding equity, not an employee.
• Funding-ready: ATUM backs the build with pre-seed capital and grant access, plus follow-on support from our investor network.
• Hands-on partners: We're in the trenches on product, hiring, and fundraising, not just on the cap table.

This is a from-zero build with real risk. If what you want is a stable senior R&D role, this isn't it. If you want to own the science and build the company, read on.