Frequently asked questions

No. A database returns values that someone already measured and recorded. Elixir predicts properties that were never measured, marks the confidence behind each prediction, and connects materials to operating conditions and failure modes so a failure can be traced back to a physical cause rather than looked up.

Every value in Elixir carries its origin: experimental, computational, or model-predicted, with the model and its confidence attached. You can see which parts of a recommendation rest on measurement and which rest on prediction before you act on any of it. You can also test the system against material systems where you already know the answer.

Availability is part of the screen. A candidate that only exists at gram scale is not useful when a program needs tonnes, so supply and manufacturability sit inside the constraints rather than as a caveat afterwards. If a candidate is promising but not currently procurable at your volume, the shortlist says so.

No. Elixir narrows a large candidate pool to a short ranked list for your specific problem, with the evidence behind each candidate, what would rule it out, and what to test next. You still qualify. The difference is what you spend that qualification budget on.

Three shapes recur. A material is failing in service and the root cause is unclear. A material has to be replaced under regulatory, supply, or obsolescence pressure. Or a performance target cannot be met with the materials currently under consideration. All three are search and screening problems before they are testing problems.

Anything you share privately stays private and is used only to sharpen your own results. It is never added to the shared knowledge base and never surfaced to another user. Separately, everything our pipelines extract from open, commercially compliant sources feeds a common knowledge base available to everyone using Elixir, so public knowledge stays public.

Small. A first engagement can be a handful of properties on a single material problem, scoped to a few weeks, priced per material rather than as a platform commitment. Most teams do not have a budget line for materials search, so the first engagement is sized to fit inside an existing project rather than to require a new one.

Both testing and consulting operate on the candidates already in front of you. The constraint is usually upstream of that: a material nobody measured never enters the comparison, so it is never rejected, it simply never appears. Elixir widens the candidate set before the expensive work starts.