alt Hacker NewsI’m a computational chemist who has been working on this kind of stuff for a while, and I will say it’s just a weird field. The overall issue is that it’s still very academic and very very fragmented. People have tried to make businesses out of this stuff but it has rarely worked, and there isn’t enough money/funding to sustain the level of work needed to really advance the field in that way. Especially now that government funding is drying up and business are reluctant to spend on fundamental research like this.
> People have tried to make businesses out of this stuff but it has rarely worked
The only two startups I'm aware of who have managed to make compchem-as-a-service a viable business are Mat3ra and Materials Square. Both are a little rough in their own ways (to be expected from startups), but it's still interesting to see some of this move beyond university clusters.