• Berlin-based company ecopals has launched Simpal, a virtual laboratory designed to accelerate materials development through digital simulation.

• New materials can take up to 20 years to reach their first industrial application, with extensive physical testing contributing significantly to development time and costs.

• Simpal digitally simulates key material properties, including tensile strength, viscosity, and thermal behaviour, before a physical prototype is produced.

• The technology is being developed as a scalable cloud-based software platform for industries including automotive, aerospace, construction, and chemicals.

Berlin, 24 September 2026. Berlin-based deep-tech company ecopals has launched Simpal, a virtual laboratory designed to accelerate materials development through digital simulation. The platform enables companies to evaluate material formulations and their expected physical behaviour before committing to extensive laboratory testing.

Material development remains heavily dependent on physical experimentation. Thousands of possible formulations may be considered during the development of a new material, while only a limited number can be tested physically due to time and cost constraints. New materials can take up to 20 years to reach their first industrial application. A single unsuccessful formulation can add weeks to a development programme, creating significant costs through repeated testing cycles.

Simpal addresses this bottleneck by moving parts of the experimental process into a digital environment. Formulations that would previously require extensive physical testing can be evaluated computationally from the outset. The platform combines multiscale molecular dynamics simulations with physics-informed machine learning models to predict material properties such as tensile strength, viscosity, and thermal behaviour before a physical prototype is produced. In materials science, where practical digital simulation has often been limited to specialised applications, the platform aims to make computational assessment accessible for a broader range of formulations.

Simpal is being developed as a scalable cloud-based software platform for industrial companies, providing access to digital material models and simulation capabilities without requiring customers to build their own computing infrastructure.

For industries including automotive, aerospace, and construction, where material properties directly influence product performance, processing, and sustainability, digital simulation offers an additional tool to accelerate development and reduce unnecessary experimental iterations.