Plano – November 03, 2026 -- ISU Specialty Chemical and Ares Materials will jointly develop polymer materials for solid-state batteries, along with the AI tools used to optimize them. The deal pairs a lithium sulfide producer with 2025 revenue of about KRW 411.5 billion (US$290 million) and a materials-AI company based in Plano, Texas, and Guadalajara, Mexico.
Ares takes formulation and AI, ISU takes production and supply
Ares will develop the polymer formulations and the AI framework used to tune them against cell-level battery test data. ISU, a member of Korea's ISU Group, will contribute its specialty-chemical and lithium sulfide manufacturing and lead production and commercial supply.
Partnership targets formulation optimization rather than molecule discovery
Developing polymers for solid-state cells typically requires building and cycling test cells for each formulation change. 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 keep shifting as the technology matures, so a formulation qualified against one target is often re-opened when the target moves.
The partnership covers formulation optimization, which adjusts the composition and processing of a chosen chemistry until it meets targets in a working device. Discovery tools, which screen candidate molecules for new materials, are outside its scope. According to Ares, its framework is trained on measured device-level performance and breaks each test result into the contribution of individual formulation and process variables. It then uses that model to select the next set of experiments.
Performance models from the first material will carry into later generations
The companies said the performance data and models generated on the first material will carry forward, so each later generation starts from an existing model rather than from scratch. Ares CEO David Arreaga said that once a model knows how each variable drives device performance, "a new target is an adjustment, not a restart."
ISU Specialty Chemical CEO Lyu Seung-Ho said customers in Korea, Japan and the United States are asking for this kind of capability. He described lithium sulfide as ISU's position in the solid-state supply chain and the partnership as the work around it.
ISU completed a commercial lithium sulfide plant this year
ISU Specialty Chemical also produces the molecular-weight regulators TDM, NOM and NDM. ISU Group is headquartered in Seoul, and its three listed affiliates reported combined 2025 revenue of more than KRW 3 trillion (about US$2.2 billion).