Florian Budde, Former McKinsey Senior Partner, Joins Kebotix Advisory Panel

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 13, 2021 – Kebotix, a U.S.-based technology platform company for new chemicals and materials, today announced that Dr. Florian Budde has joined its advisory panel.

Budde, 60, recently retired as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, where he last served as a global knowledge leader of the Chemicals Practice. Experience in this role – helping clients execute functional-excellence programs and develop strategies that improve share performance and organizational effectiveness – is expected to be of particular value to Kebotix.

“Florian’s background is perfectly suited to advise us on how we enable partners to embrace the digital revolution for the creative design of new, sustainable materials and chemicals for simultaneous improvement of short-term performance and long-term financial growth,” said Kebotix CEO Dr. Jill S. Becker. “Few in the industry can bring experience leading nearly 600 projects in strategy, mergers and acquisitions, organization and functional excellence across a wide range of product categories, among them petrochemicals, technical polymers, fibers, organic intermediates, inorganics and specialties.”

Serving companies in the chemicals, oil and gas, utilities and pharmaceuticals industries globally, Budde has supported CEOs and other company executives in transformation projects aimed at performance-related improvements. Other roles at McKinsey included building the company’s Global Chemicals & Agriculture Practice and leading a regional Global Energy and Materials Practice that encompassed the oil, gas, power, metals, mining and chemicals industries.

Budde, a self-described “academic scientist,” said one of the many draws to joining Kebotix’s advisory panel is a long-standing fascination of how to monetize technology.

“The application of modern technological approaches such as AI and machine learning has become economically relevant for the chemical industry, and Kebotix is on the forefront of this very interesting stage we’ve now reached,” said Budde, who prior to joining McKinsey in 1990 served in IBM’s Physical Science Department. “The economics of the chemical industry change as competition and speed increase, thus making things cheaper.”

Budde currently serves as the president of the German Academic Society for Physical Chemistry, and is a prolific author of articles and books on strategic management for chemical companies. He holds a doctorate in physical chemistry from the Free University of Berlin and the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, also in Berlin. He earned master’s degrees from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc in Montpellier, France. Budde and his wife live in Frankfurt and have three daughters.

About Kebotix

Kebotix partners with the private and public sector in harnessing the power of its breakthrough platform that combines artificial intelligence and robotic automation to discover chemicals and materials significantly faster and more affordably. Kebotix is backed by a growing, talented and dedicated team led by world-class scientists and serial entrepreneurs – plus the world’s first self-driving lab for materials discovery. Kebotix provides its partners technology access to its digital R&D solutions and complete end-to-end materials innovation programs to stay ahead of competition in the digital revolution. Kebotix is also dedicated to developing transformative technologies that facilitate important first steps toward tackling some of the world’s biggest challenges of the 21st century. For more information, visit www.kebotix.com.