Uncountable is a company built by cold-calling materials companies out of an MIT alumni directory, and it now runs R&D data infrastructure for Fortune 500 chemical, pharmaceutical, and materials companies after raising a $27 million Series A in 2025. The real story is less about vision statements and more about how three specific, complementary skill sets found an underserved market and stuck with a hard sell long enough to prove it out.
Where the three co-founders actually came from
Noel Hollingsworth and Will Tashman met at MIT, where Hollingsworth earned a bachelor's and master's in computer science with a focus on machine learning, and Tashman studied materials science and engineering. Before Uncountable, Hollingsworth was Director of Data at Second Spectrum, where his work applying spatial-temporal pattern recognition to NBA game data earned him a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2016. Tashman spent that same period as a product design engineer at Apple, working inside large-scale assembly plants to design manufacturing processes for the company's laptops.
Jason Hirshman rounded out the founding team after Hollingsworth had previously worked with him. Hirshman held a master's in computer science and a bachelor's in mathematics from Stanford, where he was selected for the university's AI lab, and had built data systems at Palantir modeling conditions in Syrian refugee camps before mentoring startups through StartX and working as an engineer at BenchPrep.
The gap they actually found
The three co-founders came together in the summer of 2016 around a specific observation: industrial R&D, the function behind everything from batteries and paints to cancer therapies, had a fraction of the specialized software support that sales and marketing teams took for granted. That imbalance became the founding thesis for Uncountable, and it's still the core of the company's positioning nearly a decade later: R&D generates enormous volumes of data across formulation, testing, and experimentation, but the tools available to manage that data lagged far behind other business functions.
Getting the first customers to say yes
Early traction came the unglamorous way. Tashman found Uncountable's first customer, Cooper Standard, a materials manufacturer, by working through the MIT alumni directory and cold-calling every materials company he could reach. That persistence mattered because the company's early pitch asked something genuinely difficult of prospective customers: trusting a three-person startup working out of an apartment in Sunnyvale with sensitive, proprietary formulation data.
To bridge that trust gap, the founders initially operated as a high-touch data science consultancy rather than a software vendor, delivering hands-on analysis for early customers before productizing what they'd built. By 2019, that consulting-first model had matured into the software platform Uncountable runs today.
What the company looks like now
Uncountable has grown to serve more than 100 customers globally, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to early-stage startups, across chemicals, materials, cosmetics, food and beverage, energy, and pharmaceuticals. The company closed a $27 million Series A funding round in June 2025, led by Sageview Capital with participation from SE Ventures and existing investors Teamworthy, 8VC, and MK Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $32.5 million since the company's 2016 seed round.
Where the company is headed
The founders describe AI integration as central to what comes next, particularly around making data capture itself easier for scientists working at the bench, such as recording measurements through voice input rather than manual entry. That direction fits the company's original thesis: R&D teams lose time to the mechanics of data management, and removing that friction is what actually accelerates discovery.
Nine years after three people were cold-calling companies from an apartment, the thesis that got them started, that R&D deserved the same caliber of software as every other business function, has held up well enough to attract $27 million from investors betting it still has a long way to run.
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