The diagnostic category for materials integration failure didn't exist. Now it does.

The founding insight

During 12 years at Intel spanning the 22nm, 14nm, and 10nm node ramps, a pattern kept repeating. Programs had the science right. The materials were real. But failures kept surfacing late — after hundreds of millions in fab investment — and engineers kept attributing them to process variation or equipment drift. The actual cause was stack-level integration constraints that no one could see, because the diagnostic category to name them didn't exist.

Materis was built to create that category.

Dr. Melissa Fortuna | Founder & CEO

Melissa is a Materials Scientist, systems thinker, and the only person in the room who has lived every layer of this problem.

She holds a PhD in Materials Science from Vanderbilt University, where her research focused on gradients in quantum materials — the same physics that underlies Materis's approach to nanoscale interface prediction. She entered Vanderbilt as an NSF IGERT Fellow through the Fisk-Vanderbilt Bridge Program, and spent nearly 10 years at Intel as a Back-End Defect Reduction Manager across the 22nm, 14nm, and 10nm node ramps — three of the most consequential transitions in semiconductor history.

That experience — watching integration failures get misattributed, watching programs retreat, watching billions get committed to stacks that couldn't survive deployment — is the founding insight behind Materis.

Materis Labs was incorporated in January 2026. Five provisional patents have been filed covering the core architecture, including multi-manifold GNN stack reasoning, provenance-weighted trust scoring, and SIR score generation. The materials graph bank has grown to 34,000+ materials — a scale milestone reached six to nine months ahead of plan.

The vision

The next decade of technological competition — in AI hardware, quantum systems, defense electronics, and clean energy — will be won or lost at the materials layer.

Materis is building the intelligence infrastructure that makes that layer navigable: a system of record for materials integration decisions that compounds in knowledge with every run, across every stakeholder who touches the stack.

Not a tool. Infrastructure.