MateriaX · Senior technology leadership for materials-driven companies
Materials. Products.
AI. Connected.
I'm Dr. Yakov Kutsovsky, former CTO of Cabot Corporation, co-founder of Group1, and Expert-in-Residence at Harvard. I help companies get new materials from lab breakthroughs to profitable production and new applications.
Deep enough to understand the technical work. Experienced enough to see how product, process, and company choices affect one another. Close enough to the work to help the company act.
Judgment built at industrial scale. Applied with startup speed and agency.
Long-term advisor · Board director or advisory-board member · Fractional CTO or CSO
The decisions are connected. The work should be too.
In tires, batteries, coatings, and other performance products, the material is only one part of the system. Multiple materials, interfaces, components, and processes must work together. Improving one can shift performance, manufacturability, cost, or qualification somewhere else. I help companies resolve those tradeoffs across the full system.
At Cabot, my work spanned materials, process, manufacturing, product performance, and customer requirements. At Group1, I worked across cathode materials, electrodes, and cells while scaling cathode production from laboratory synthesis to pilot scale. Different scale. The same responsibility: make the whole system work.
Five questions I help companies work through.
Which product and application should we pursue first?
A strong material may fit several markets, but the first application shapes product design, qualification, partners, capital, and time to revenue. The right focus combines a real customer problem, meaningful performance gain, willingness to pay, and a credible path to adoption.
What else has to work in the complete product?
A material advantage has to survive in the complete product, not only in a material test. I help teams identify which interaction limits performance and what to change next.
What will change at scale and during customer qualification?
At larger scale, mixing, heat and mass transfer, equipment, yield, consistency, safety, and cost can all change. Customer qualification tests the product under conditions the laboratory may not reproduce. Either can require changes to the material, process, or product design.
What must we own or control, and where do we need partners?
The company must decide which materials, processes, data, product know-how, capabilities, and rights are strategic. Patents, trade secrets, licenses, field-of-use rights, and development agreements preserve control in different ways. Partners should add capability or speed without giving up control of what matters.
How can AI and materials informatics change materials and product development?
AI can change both the range of possibilities a team can examine and how the company learns across materials, products, and customers. The right starting point depends on what the company is building and the capability it already has.
These questions move together. A change in one can reopen the others as the product, the evidence, and the company evolve.
Where technical possibility meets commercial value
Materials. Processes. Product architectures. What could work.
Applications. Customers. Economics. What creates value.
The work moves between both questions as evidence changes. Experience and judgment determine what to pursue, prove, protect, and scale. The X in MateriaX is where what could work meets what creates value.
AI expands what companies can learn, build, and bring to customers.
Companies whose products depend on materials hold valuable evidence across experiments, manufacturing, product development, customer programs, IP, and economics. Much of it is hard to use together. AI can make individual tasks faster. The step change comes when a company can examine possibilities that were previously impractical and carry learning from materials and processes into products and customers.
Examine more possible paths
Teams can examine more materials, formulations, process conditions, product architectures, applications, and commercial paths. They can use experimental results alongside product performance, customer evidence, manufacturing constraints, IP, partnerships, and economics. Each program can build on more of what the company already knows.
Build a company capability, not a tool collection
The company must create and structure usable data. Context must preserve what each result means. Workflows must carry knowledge across the places where evidence is created and used. The company can then select the models, knowledge graphs, and agents suited to the work. Privacy, access, traceability, and ownership must be designed in from the start.
Experience behind the approach
At Cabot, I led the design and implementation of a global materials-informatics system across five technology centers. At Group1, we built AI and materials informatics into materials and battery development and scale-up from the beginning. I now serve as Senior Advisor to Uncountable.
In my own technical and strategic work, I use AI models and agents to examine more evidence, compare more paths, and build technical, IP, financial, and computational models. Using these systems myself keeps the work grounded in what they can do, what they require, and where new evidence still has to be created.
The measure is not how many AI tools a company deploys. It is whether teams can examine more paths with the right context, carry learning across programs, and turn more of that learning into products customers value. Technical claims still have to hold in experiments, products, manufacturing, and customer use.
Where I have the highest impact.
Materials and hardtech startups need industrial-scale experience without corporate drag. Established companies need startup speed and agency without losing rigor. Boards need independent technical judgment when technology shapes growth, risk, and capital.
Materials & hardtech startups
I work with founders who have a real technical result but an unsettled first market, customer proof, scale path, or ownership boundary. I help the team choose the application, define the proof, build the materials and process path, and decide what the company must own, secure, or partner for next. When the ambition is an AI-first materials and product venture, I help design the development capability into the venture from the beginning.
How I work →Mid-sized companies whose future depends on materials
I work with specialty-materials companies and manufacturers of batteries, cells, coatings, and other advanced products deciding whether a materials or product platform deserves the next major commitment. I help the CEO and technology team define product and application proof, set R&D priorities, and align manufacturing, qualification, IP, partnerships, and investment. Where AI can change development, I help leadership decide what to create, connect, or redesign rather than simply automate the existing workflow.
How I work →Boards overseeing technology-led growth
I work with boards asked to approve capital, an acquisition, a first plant, or a technology-led growth plan where the technical and operating assumptions are consequential. I bring independent operator judgment to product credibility, manufacturing readiness, partner dependence, organization, and the company's ability to execute. I also test whether management's AI ambition, investment, evidence, governance, and protection of company knowledge are credible and proportionate to the strategy. This perspective draws on five years as a board director.
Board service →
florrent
Modern Hydrogen
These relationships are publicly disclosed. Across them, my work has included first commercial launches; first-of-a-kind materials, cells, and process scale-ups; federal awards; and manufacturing-scale decisions. My current work with established chemical and specialty-formulation companies is generally private under NDA.
I stay with the work.
I stay close as decisions move into execution, evidence changes, and results become visible. That continuity is why I prefer long-term engagements.
I take ownership of my contribution and judge it by impact, not by the advice delivered. In fractional leadership, that includes shared accountability for delivery. In board and advisory roles, it means sustained attention, candid challenge, and independent judgment within the authority of the role.
I coach leaders and mentor technical teams while we solve the problem, building judgment and capability that remain inside the company.
Long-term advisorIndependent judgment without executive authority
Board director or advisory-board memberTwo formal roles with different duties
Fractional CTO / CSOEmbedded executive technology leadership
It starts as a conversation,
not a contract.
We begin with the company, not a service package. We talk about the technology, the team, the ambition, and the issue that matters now. Those conversations usually make clear where my experience and judgment can help. I can also share specific examples of relevant work in the first conversation.
If I am not the right person, I will say so and point you elsewhere. If we continue, I learn how the company got here, meet the team, and identify the key assumptions.
The right role becomes clear through these conversations.
I check for conflicts before sensitive information is shared. When the conversation reaches confidential company information, I put a mutual NDA in place and keep each client's information separate. We agree in advance whether any outside system, including an AI service, may receive company information and under what safeguards. Board appointments follow the company's governance, conflict, and confidentiality requirements.
Judgment comes from experience.
This is where mine was built.
I'm Yakov Kutsovsky. I've spent 35 years taking new materials from grams in a lab to tens of thousands of tons across commercial sites, while building the teams, IP positions, and businesses around them.
Built at global scale
At Cabot Corporation, I served as CTO and Chief Scientific Officer for 15 years and led a 350-person R&D organization across five global technology centers. My work spanned tires, batteries, displays, inkjet printing, coatings, adhesives, sealants, and plastic composites. I built global collaboration programs with leading customers and partners that led to new products and technology licensing. I also identified and executed multiple M&A opportunities that expanded Cabot's technology portfolio.
As President of Applied Nanostructured Solutions, I held responsibility for operations and capital projects. We tripled capacity and expanded the opportunity pipeline fivefold.
Startup speed and agency
I co-founded Group1 and served for five years as Chief Scientific Officer, leading materials and battery development, process scale-up, and IP strategy.
Group1 began with the idea and first KPW paper from Professor John Goodenough's laboratory at UT Austin. Co-founder Leigang Xue invented the cathode there. We secured exclusive technology rights, moved KPW production from laboratory synthesis to pilot scale, and developed what Group1 announced as the world's first 18650-format potassium-ion cell, using graphite as the anode. We also secured $1.5M in NSF STTR and SBIR funding. Building Group1 and advising other startups taught me that strategy has to become action.
Current work
As an Expert-in-Residence at Harvard, my research with Zhigang Suo's group has produced seven publications from 2023 through 2026, including work in Nature, Nature Sustainability, Nature Communications, and PNAS.
Through MateriaX, I advise founders and CEOs, serve as a fractional CTO in private chemical and specialty formulation companies, and take board or advisory-board roles when the mandate fits. My board work draws on five years of board-director experience. Across these relationships, I stay close enough to test assumptions, work through disagreement, and see how one choice changes the others.
Work you can inspect.
Public evidence of how I think and work: industrial presentations, practical frameworks, and peer-reviewed research.
The Moat & the Bridge
How startups work with corporate partners without giving away their future. Partnership structure, proof-of-concept design, and NDA/JDA terms determine who owns what comes next. Taught at Greentown Labs and used in client work.
View the presentation →
Industrializing performance materials
The deck shows how application requirements, product-by-process design, computational modeling, scale-up, formulation, safety, and cost were treated as one commercialization problem across carbon black, fumed oxides, inkjet colorants, aerogels, battery materials, and advanced composites.
View the presentation →Harvard SEAS · The PNAS tire-composite work (2026)
Harvard SEAS · The Nature fatigue-resistance work (2023)
Essays land on LinkedIn first. Follow on LinkedIn ↗ · Public record: publications & patents →
Tell me what you're trying to build or decide.
A short note is enough. Tell me what you're building, the decision ahead, and why it matters now. I read every note myself and respond within two business days. I take on a small number of engagements, so fit matters.