February 3, 2025
In a world where discovering a new material can cost $100 million and take over a decade, Yonder Materials is flipping the script. This Seattle-based startup isn’t just innovating—they’re pioneering a new era in materials R&D.
Led by Chris Ashfield, Don Montgomery, and Dave Clark, Yonder has developed a self-driving lab platform that marries artificial intelligence with hard science to unlock materials for everything from high-performance batteries to quantum computing.
Every visionary journey starts with a spark, and for Yonder, that spark ignited in an unlikely place: a university-affiliated testbed lab.
Revolutionizing materials science
Yonder runs thousands of experiments each day with its autonomous “lab-on-a-chip” platform, which combines generative AI with high-throughput synthesis to make real-world materials with precisely engineered properties. It’s grounded in the principle of inverse design: tell the system what you need a material to do, and it develops a viable candidate.
The impact? Discovering materials not in decades or millions of dollars, but in weeks — on a startup budget.
Starting in a garage only gets you so far
The concept of automating lab experiments isn’t new: Yonder CTO Montgomery has been innovating in the field since the 1990s, including a successful startup using similar hardware to make strands of DNA, while pharmaceutical companies have scaled up the method to develop new drugs.
Inorganic materials presented a different set of challenges, and the next step only became possible with modern AI models and processing power: teaching a computer to understand inverse design, perform real chemistry and learn from the results to discover new materials for all purposes. Inspired by these advances in computing, the co-founders formed Yonder and started working in Ashfield’s garage.
Even for experienced entrepreneurs with a wealth of technical knowledge, launching a hard-tech company is never easy. Labs are expensive, compliance is a minefield, and access to high-end equipment can be limited. That’s where the Testbeds came in.
At the Testbeds, Yonder found a home that offered 24/7 open access to state-of-the-art capabilities for an almost symbolic cost. From pipettes and fume hoods to electron microscopes, everything they needed to conduct experiments and validate new materials was ready to go in the facility.
“All of that was included at a manageable monthly cost,” recalled Ashfield, Yonder’s chief operating officer. “That kind of access just doesn’t exist anywhere else for startups.”
Partnerships that power the future
In its early stages, Yonder won in-kind support to use Testbeds capabilities thanks to a partnership with the CleanTech Alliance and VertueLab. It was a golden opportunity to develop and demonstrate their technology, and Yonder’s credibility skyrocketed thanks to its Testbeds presence. Investors took notice, and so did researchers at leading universities.
“It’s not just the tools, it’s the relationships, visibility, and legitimacy,” said Clark, Yonder’s senior vice president of business development.
The secret weapon for startups
For any startup venturing into hard tech, Yonder’s founders offer this advice: use the Testbeds. The mix of affordability, professional infrastructure, and a collaborative environment makes the lab a uniquely powerful resource for innovators.
And while Yonder has its eyes on growing into its own facility with fresh funding, the Testbeds will forever be part of its origin story.
“As we grow and expand, we will always consider the Testbeds a foundational early partner, for which we will be forever grateful,” Ashfield beamed. “This company literally wouldn’t exist without the Testbeds.”