Riven raised $7.9M pre-seed round led by Cerberus Ventures with NSV as incubating investor and won Dept. of Energy’s Genesis Mission award for AI innovation.
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, August 13, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Riven Systems, an industrial chemistry startup focused on modernizing domestic critical minerals processing and bringing AI to the built world, today announced it has emerged from stealth with $7.9 million in funding. The pre-seed round was led by Cerberus Ventures, with participation from Scout Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Lightscape Partners, and CLAI, with New System Ventures as incubating investor.
Led by co-founders Chip Breitenkamp, Chief Executive Officer, and Orion Archer Cohen, Chief Technology Officer, Riven is developing an integrated AI platform for industrial chemistry, designed to substantially streamline processing of critical minerals and replace legacy systems.
While critical minerals, including rare earth elements, underpin virtually every facet of modern industry, from defense systems to energy infrastructure to compute architecture, China still controls the vast majority of global processing capacity. Riven seeks to play a key role in building a competitive, U.S.-led alternative to China’s critical minerals supply chain by integrating autonomous laboratories, computational modeling, and AI within real-world infrastructure to develop and rapidly de-risk processing chemistry for domestic producers, reducing costs and timelines by orders of magnitude.
“Today’s critical minerals bottleneck is ultimately a chemistry problem; ores and feedstocks have changed over time, but legacy industrial chemistry hasn’t,” said Dr. Breitenkamp. “By leveraging America’s lead in AI to identify new chemical extractants and optimize existing facilities, Riven will accelerate mineral processing deployment for domestic miners in the near term and, over the long term, build a chemistry platform capable of scaling across industries.”
Riven’s co-founders pair deep computational chemistry expertise with a track record of scaling advanced materials companies. Dr. Breitenkamp is an inventor of over 20 patent families and previously served as President of battery materials manufacturer NanoGraf Corporation. Dr. Cohen holds a PhD in chemistry from UC Berkeley, where he was an NSF Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a contributor to the Materials Project. He led the development of TorchSim, the primary open-source tool for AI-accelerated atomistic simulation, including a collaboration with NVIDIA.
“With the West still heavily reliant on China for critical minerals processing, building a secure, domestic, end-to-end supply chain has become a strategic imperative. Yet much of today’s U.S. processing infrastructure remains dependent on manual, capital intensive chemical methods. To compete, we need to leverage AI-driven technologies that continuously optimize and modernize these processes,” said Sarah Istel, Managing Director at Cerberus Ventures. “That’s why Cerberus Ventures is excited to back Riven. Chip, Orion, and their team are tackling one of the industry’s most important challenges: creating the first autonomous platform for mineral separation. Powered by one of the world’s largest separations datasets, Riven’s technology aims to enable rapid deployment of modular, feedstock-specific processing solutions, paving the way for the U.S. to potentially onshore critical minerals processing at scale.”
Riven was incubated by New System Ventures, an investment firm focused on energy security and reindustrialization. Through its systems-level research, it identified the strategic importance of focusing specifically on domestic critical minerals processing.
“Driven by legacy technologies and economic statecraft, the West has found itself deeply dependent on China for its critical mineral needs, and I have spent the last fifteen years watching us fail to reclaim our independence using the same processes invented in the United States but exported abroad,” said Ian Samuels, founder and managing partner of New System Ventures. “We are thrilled to partner with Riven to unlock cleaner and more efficient critical mineral production—moving the industry from a strategic vulnerability to a source of domestic strength.”
Riven was recently awarded a grant from the Department of Energy’s (“DOE”) Genesis Mission, offered to less than 5% of applicants in one of the DOE’s most competitive funding opportunities in history. The program supports projects harnessing AI for breakthroughs in energy, discovery science, and national security. As project lead, Riven is collaborating with researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, and the University of California Berkeley, with an initial focus on rare earths.
Riven is hiring across its technical and commercial teams, including roles in computational chemistry, machine learning, process chemistry, and business development. Open roles and contact information are available at rivensystems.ai.
About Riven Systems
Riven Systems builds AI-accelerated separation technology to bring critical minerals processing back to the United States. The company is headquartered in New York City, NY. Learn more at rivensystems.ai.
Media contact: media@rivensystems.ai
Chip Breitenkamp
Riven Systems
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