Rara Factory, a deep tech spin off of Ca' Foscari university of Venice, raises €3M+ seed investment round to scale phisics-driven AI material discovery for the replacement of rare earths

14 gen 2026 Primo Climate, Rara Factory

Venice, Italy, 14/01/2026 - RARA Factory, a deep-tech startupthat accelerates the discovery of new materials as alternatives to rare earths through physics-driven artificial intelligence, announces it has raised €3.2 million in seed funding. The round was backed by Primo Capital, through its Primo Climate fund, CDP Venture Capital SGR through its Accelerators Fund and a group of business angels led by Alberto Baban, president of Fondazione Nord Est

The funding will primarily expand RARA Factory’s high-throughput experimental capabilities, by an investment in lab infrastructure, including advanced instrumentation for the synthesis and full characterization of novel materials designed for industrial applications industrial applications in strategic sectors such as energy, mobility, and aerospace, removing the needs for rare earths and other critical raw materials.

Founded in 2024 by four professors from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, RARA Factory has built a proprietary platform that integrates AI with experimental materials physics. Unlike purely computational approaches, the company generates real experimental data at scale, enabling rapid iteration and validation. To date, nearly 10,000 new materials have been created and tested, making the foundation for the training of the AI-model and have already revealed new alloys of potentially great interest. In 2024 RARA Factory was selected among the 5 startups that took part in the Motor Valley Accelerator in Modena, the programme of the CDP Venture Capital National Accelerator Network dedicated to start-ups developing solutions for the automotive and mobility sectors, with Plug and Play Tech Centre, UniCredit and Fondazione di Modena as co-investors, proving to be one of the most promising realities of the program.

RARA Factory has already secured its first commercial contract and signed collaborative agreements with leading Italian and international companies. The seed investment will support rapid technical development and business expansion toward strategic partnerships and commercial deployment.

“We created RARA Factory to innovate and make more systematic and efficient the way new materials are discovered, and finally implemented, in the industrial reality.” says Stefano Bonetti, lead founder and professor of Experimental Materials Physics. “By combining physics-guided AI with large-scale experimental validation, we aim at designing and optimize new materials in days rather than years.”

“With over a hundred materials synthesized and characterized on a daily basis, measuring all properties relevant to industrial deployment,” continues Michele Bugliesi, founder, professor of Computer Science and former Rector of the Ca’ Foscari “our proprietary dataset will soon be ready to respond to the quest for alternatives to rare earths and critical raw materials across strategic industrial sectors”.

The acceleration of the energy and industrial transition is driving unprecedented demand for new materials, often characterized by limited availability, critical extraction processes, and complex global supply chains. As a result, materials innovation has become an urgent strategic imperative for both economic resilience and environmental sustainability.

“Materials innovation has been constrained by the lack of high-quality experimental data,” comments Giusy Cannone, partner at Primo Climate. “RARA Factory’s ability to generate proprietary datasets at scale, grounded in real physics and experiments, is a key differentiator in this space. Rara Factory’s solutions are a key asset to boost Italian and European economic competitiveness and strategic independence”.

“RARA Factory is a strong example of collaboration between research and industry. The project has the potential to strengthen the national advanced-materials ecosystem and to generate long-term industrial and technological impact,” adds Stefano Molino head of Accelerators Fund of CDP Venture Capital SGR.

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