Scimplify, a Bengaluru startup that makes specialty chemicals and critical materials for industrial customers, has raised $25 million from Hitachi Ventures and a group of existing investors. Its customers Henkel and Teknor Apex also joined the round. The pitch is that manufacturers want a second source for materials that China dominates, and that software can shorten the road to getting one.
The round was all equity. Accel India, Bertelsmann India Investments, Omnivore, and 3one4 Capital, all earlier backers, took part, and total equity raised now stands at $80 million, according to TechCrunch, which reported the deal on 14 October. Scimplify declined to disclose its valuation. TechCrunch also cites an unnamed source with knowledge of the deal for a $250 million valuation, up from $150 million after a $40 million round in March 2025. Treat that figure as a leak, not a disclosure.
The product is not what “AI for critical materials” might suggest. Scimplify is not discovering molecules. When a customer places an order, the company develops a manufacturing process at its labs in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, then transfers it to a partner factory for commercial production. Its platform, Scinode, helps by picking production routes and factories and by tracking quality and regulatory requirements. Co-founder Sachin Santhosh told TechCrunch the platform uses separate AI agents for research, manufacturing, and quality control, each working backward from what the customer needs.
That makes Scimplify closer to a managed network of contract manufacturers than to a software company. It oversees more than 500 facilities with about 340 employees, roughly 70 of them scientists. The AI layer plausibly earns its keep on the slow part: finding which plant can run a given reaction, and keeping paperwork straight across dozens of countries. Santhosh says one job went from customer requirements to finished material in two months, against the 12 to 18 months he describes as typical. He cited a TDK project as the example and added that timelines vary. No independent check of that comparison appears in the report.
The revenue claims are large. Santhosh says annualized revenue is about $200 million, tripled in a year, with a target of $400 million over the next twelve months. He says more than 1,000 customers buy from the company, and that it has been EBITDA-positive for two months. All of those figures come from the founder. Named customers are TDK, BASF, and Hitachi, which is notable because Hitachi’s venture arm led the round, so one of the buyers is also the lead investor. Henkel and Teknor Apex are customers turned shareholders as well. None of that implies anything improper, but customers who also hold equity make the revenue harder to read as pure market demand, and the report does not say how much of the $200 million comes from them.
Then there is the framing in the headline. About 90 percent of Scimplify’s manufacturing happens in India. That diversifies a customer away from China, but it moves the dependency rather than ending it. The company plans to add production in the U.S. and Japan over the next year. On the hardest categories, it is early: Santhosh says it is working on tungsten derivatives made from scrap and on rare-earth materials, both heavily concentrated in China, but the report gives no volumes or customers for either.
The use of funds shows the scale. Santhosh said about $7.5 million of the $25 million is earmarked for U.S. expansion and $2 million for Scinode, with the U.S. split subject to change. That leaves most of the round unassigned in the report. Chemical supply chains run on decades of installed plant capacity, and nothing here suggests a startup this size changes China’s position. What it does suggest is that Western buyers will pay a premium for a qualified second source, with U.S. annualized revenue reportedly sixfold higher at about $60 million.
For any hardware or electronics team with a single-country material in its bill of materials, the useful test is Scimplify’s two-month claim: ask for a qualified second source on one part, and see whether the clock holds.
Reported by TechCrunch on 14 October 2026
