Riven Systems, an industrial chemistry startup, has emerged from stealth with $7.9 million in funding. Cerberus Ventures led the pre-seed round, with participation from Scout Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Lightscape Partners, and CLAI, with New System Ventures as the incubating investor
Led by co-founders Chip Breitenkamp, CEO, and Orion Archer Cohen, CTO, Riven is developing an integrated AI platform for industrial chemistry to streamline critical minerals processing and replace legacy systems.
Critical minerals underpin virtually every aspect of modern industry, including defence systems, energy infrastructure, and compute architecture, but China still controls the vast majority of global processing capacity.
Riven seeks to help build a competitive, US-led alternative to China’s critical minerals supply chain by integrating autonomous laboratories, computational modelling, and AI into real-world infrastructure to develop and de-risk processing chemistry for domestic producers, reducing costs and timelines by orders of magnitude.
Breitenkamp said, “Today’s critical minerals bottleneck is ultimately a chemistry problem; ores and feedstocks have changed over time, but legacy industrial chemistry hasn’t. By leveraging America’s lead in AI to identify new chemical extractants and optimise existing facilities, Riven will accelerate mineral processing deployment for domestic miners in the near term and, over the long term, build a chemistry platform capable of scaling across industries.”
Sarah Istel, managing director at Cerberus Ventures, said, “With the West still heavily reliant on China for critical minerals processing, building a secure, domestic, end-to-end supply chain has become a strategic imperative. Yet much of today’s US processing infrastructure remains dependent on manual, capital-intensive chemical methods. To compete, we need to leverage AI-driven technologies that continuously optimise and modernise these processes. That’s why Cerberus Ventures is excited to back Riven. Chip, Orion, and their team are tackling one of the industry’s most important challenges: creating the first autonomous platform for mineral separation. Powered by one of the world’s largest separations datasets, Riven’s technology aims to enable rapid deployment of modular, feedstock-specific processing solutions, paving the way for the US to potentially onshore critical minerals processing at scale.”
Riven was incubated by New System Ventures, an investment firm focused on energy security and reindustrialisation. Its systems-level research enabled it to identify the strategic importance of focusing specifically on domestic critical minerals processing.
Ian Samuels, founder and managing partner of New System Ventures, said, “Driven by legacy technologies and economic statecraft, the West has found itself deeply dependent on China for its critical mineral needs, and I have spent the last fifteen years watching us fail to reclaim our independence using the same processes invented in the United States but exported abroad. We are thrilled to partner with Riven to unlock cleaner and more efficient critical mineral production, moving the industry from a strategic vulnerability to a source of domestic strength.”
Riven was also recently awarded a grant from the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, offered to less than 5% of applicants in one of the department’s most competitive funding opportunities. The program supports projects using AI for breakthroughs in energy, discovery science, and national security. As project lead, Riven is collaborating with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, and the University of California Berkeley, with an initial focus on rare earths.
