Partnership pairs ISU’s lithium sulfide and specialty-chemical production with Ares’ closed-loop AI framework for application-driven formulation
PLANO, Texas and SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — ISU Specialty Chemical, a lithium sulfide producer and member of Korea’s ISU Group, and Ares Materials, a materials-AI company based in Plano, Texas, and Guadalajara, Mexico, said Wednesday they will jointly develop polymer materials for solid-state batteries, along with the AI tools used to optimize them.
Under the agreement, Ares will develop the polymer formulations and the AI framework used to tune them against cell-level battery test data. ISU will contribute its specialty-chemical and lithium sulfide manufacturing and lead production and commercial supply.
Developing polymers for solid-state cells typically requires building and cycling test cells for each change to a formulation. Battery makers have cited the length of that cycle, and the difficulty of attributing a result to a specific ingredient or process step, as a constraint on commercialization timelines. Cell specifications also continue to change as the technology matures, so a formulation qualified against one target is often re-opened when the target moves.
AI tools for materials fall broadly into two categories: discovery, which screens candidate molecules to identify new materials, and formulation optimization, which adjusts the composition and processing of a chosen chemistry until it meets targets in a working device. The partnership covers the second. According to Ares, its framework is trained on measured device-level performance and decomposes each test result into the contribution of individual formulation and process variables, then uses that model to select the next set of experiments. The companies said the performance data and models generated in developing the first material will carry forward into the next generations of the product, so that each one starts from an existing performance model rather than from scratch.
“The combination of AI-based materials intelligence and established specialty-chemical manufacturing can help address a key industry challenge: developing and commercializing better materials with fewer iterations and less time,” said Liz Lee, Associate Director at Counterpoint Research. “As battery and electronics manufacturers seek improved performance, partnerships connecting predictive materials design with industrial-scale expertise could become an important source of competitive advantage, particularly for next-generation battery materials where quality, cost and scalability are critical.”
ISU Specialty Chemical, a member of Korea’s ISU Group, reported 2025 revenue of approximately ₩411.5 billion (about US$290 million). It produces molecular-weight regulators, including TDM, NOM and NDM, and completed a commercial lithium sulfide plant this year. ISU Group, headquartered in Seoul, dates to the founding of ISU Chemical in 1969; its three listed affiliates reported combined 2025 revenue of more than ₩3 trillion (about US$2.2 billion).
“Lithium sulfide gives us a position in the solid-state supply chain. This partnership is about what sits next to it,” said Lyu Seung-Ho, CEO of ISU Specialty Chemical. “Each generation we develop this way makes the next one faster, and that is the kind of capability our customers in Korea, Japan and the United States are asking us for.”
Ares Materials develops polymers and the closed-loop AI infrastructure used to formulate them against real-world performance. It has been selected for the Apple Impact Accelerator and the Amazon Climate Tech Accelerator.
“Every materials supplier in this space knows the pattern: you hit the spec, the spec moves, and you start over,” said Dr. David Arreaga, CEO of Ares Materials. “What we’re building with ISU is meant to break that cycle. When a model already knows how each formulation variable drives device performance, a new target is an adjustment, not a restart.”
Media and Partnership Inquiries
Contact: Regina Coronado
Email: regina@aresmaterials.com
Phone: (+1) 844.925.2737
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SOURCE ISU Specialty Chemical
