Innovation Award: Steve Kench

Congratulations to the Steve Kench, CTO of Polaron, for winning the 2024 Faraday Institution Community Award for Innovation.  

This is a truly inspiring success story. The nomination highlights exceptional achievements, from impactful research outputs to the generation of IP, and the creation of a spin-out company that is already demonstrating its considerable potential. 

Polaron founders: Steve Kench, Isaac Squires and Sam Cooper. Photo: Polaron

Early in his PhD at Imperial College London, Steve identified that the design of electrodes was a major real-world problem for batteries. He has displayed an extraordinary level of original thinking and creativity to address this problem using state of the art AI, that is both faster and more accurate than the physics-based modelling. He has published seven journal articles on the subject, with two more currently under review. The most significant of these was featured on the front cover of Nature Machine Intelligence. His research, which formed part of the Multi-scale Modelling Project, is showing huge potential for impact in the battery industry and beyond. 

In January 2024, spin-out Polaron was launched by co-founders Steve (CTO), Isaac Squires (CEO) and Sam Cooper (Chief Scientist) to commercialise IP based on Steve’s research on generative AI techniques. It is helping companies design higher performing materials for battery applications and beyond (for example, in advanced alloys). The spin-out’s technology promises to enable manufacturers of the advanced materials used in these products to accelerate their design by modelling the complex relationships between processing parameters, the microstructures of the materials produced, and the performance of the resulting products. 

Polaron has recently closed a successful pre-seed funding round and now has backing from a major venture capital fund, as well as several notable angel investors. An Industry Sprint between Polaron and WMG, University of Warwick is underway focused on the design of lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) cathodes. The spin-out has also signed contracts with UK companies to begin deploying generative AI tools into their design workflow. Most recently, Polaron were announced as finalists for the inaugural Manchester Prize for AI, where each of the 10 finalist companies receives £100,000 as well as the opportunity to win an additional £1,000,000 if selected as the winner. 

Polaron’s AI platform is built on image-based generative AI algorithms, with microstructural image data at its core. Image: Polaron

Steve was part of the second cohort of the Faraday Institution PhD Training Programme, which has a strong focus on developing business readiness skills. The review panel for the 2024 Community Awards remarked “This work clearly highlights how work carried out at any stage of your career journey can have a lasting effect on the wider community and will hopefully serve as inspiration for anyone hoping to take their work on a similar path.” 

Please join us in congratulating Steve on his achievements to date. We will watch Polaron’s future successes with great interest. 

Steve was not able to attend the awards ceremony, but it was received on his behalf by Sam Cooper (Co-founder of Polaron).

Left to right: Sam Cooper of Imperial and Polaron, Joanna Thurston of Withers and Rogers (award sponsor), Martin Freer CEO of the Faraday Institution.

Check out the YouTube video:

Posted on September 11, 2024