BASF ECMS Deploys AI Materials Discovery Platform Built by Orbital Industries

LONDON, 05.08.2026 — AI industrial company Orbital Industries today announced an agreement with BASF Environmental Catalyst and Metal Solutions (ECMS), a leading supplier for aftertreatment systems and catalytic solutions to the automotive market, to licence Orbital Industries' proprietary AI platform, CurieOS.

CurieOS has previously been used to discover and engineer a next-generation PFAS-free cooling material developed for Orbital Industries' data center brand, Orbital IT. Under the agreement, ECMS will deploy the same platform for AI-enabled discovery to support catalyst innovation and development for automotive emissions applications.

Traditionally, discovering new materials has been a slow and expensive process of laboratory experiments. Each candidate material must be synthesised, characterised, and tested under real-world conditions – a cycle that can take weeks per formulation and years per development campaign. CurieOS compresses that discovery phase by using AI to identify the most promising material before a single sample is made in the lab.

CurieOS acts as an AI research partner that scientists can direct with goal-driven, multi-step instructions – from surveying scientific literature and analysing experimental data, to running simulations to generate new hypotheses in a fraction of the time. CurieOS' core tool is Orb, Orbital Industries' market-leading, AI-accelerated simulation model that can accurately predict the properties of entirely new materials. It provides scientists with a "Virtual Lab" that collapses months of physical testing into hours. Designing new materials demands expertise spanning chemistry, physics, and engineering – CurieOS can draw on PhD-level knowledge across all three disciplines to extract cross-domain insights that no human could do alone.

Just as large language models have scaled to handle longer and longer documents, Orb has scaled to simulate larger and larger physical systems: it is the only model that can simulate 100,000 atoms on a single GPU, where every competitor crashes [1]. It runs ten times faster than the nearest alternative – outperforming models from Microsoft, Meta and leading academic labs – turning week-long quantum simulations into coffee-break computations [1]. Independent benchmarks also show its predictions don't drift or hallucinate over time, meaning scientists can trust the results without babysitting the model [1].

"Catalysis is a brutal test for any simulation model – you're dealing with complex surfaces, large systems, and subtle interactions that cheaper methods miss. Orb was built for exactly this: it can simulate systems of a scale and complexity that were previously out of reach, fast enough that scientists can actually iterate. That's what makes it valuable for real industrial workflows rather than just a research demo."

— James Gin-Pollock, Chief Technology Officer of Orbital Industries

"The hardest part of materials discovery is knowing where to look. CurieOS gives scientists a way to explore and test ideas computationally before committing time in the lab, which means more of their effort goes into the candidates that matter. ECMS hosts exactly the kind of demanding, real-world materials development we built this for."

— Jonathan Godwin, Chief Executive Officer of Orbital Industries

"The agreement comes at a critical time for the automotive sector. The development of mobile emissions catalyst technologies continues to be driven by tightening emissions regulations, evolving powertrain technologies and alternative fuels, as well as growing cost pressure. At BASF ECMS, we continuously explore new approaches to the need to accelerate development and further improve R&D and application efficiency. Through this agreement, we look forward to leveraging emerging AI technologies to enhance our ability to deliver leading solutions and help address evolving customer and market needs."

— Saeed Alerasool, BASF Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for ECMS

About Orbital Industries

Orbital Industries is an AI-first industrial company building hardware from the atoms up. Our goal is to lead an industrial renaissance to advance critical technologies and secure our planet for generations to come. Every Orbital Industries product is invented using its proprietary AI platform, uniting AI-automated hardware engineering with AI-designed material science to achieve breakthrough real-world performance.

For more information, visit orbitalindustries.com

Notes for Editors

[1] Rhodes et al., "Orb-v3: atomistic simulation at scale," arXiv:2504.06231, April 2025.