Connected by Design
Ares Materials
By Jared Campbell
October 2025
At Ares Materials, solving complex materials science challenges requires more than just brilliant minds—it demands orchestrating expertise across continents. With 30 team members spanning Dallas, Guadalajara, Seoul, and Tokyo, the company has mastered the art of unifying diverse approaches under a shared scientific mission.
The geographic distribution reflects the company’s multifaceted approach to innovation. In Dallas, 15 team members focus on physical experience reactions, conducting hands-on experiments that test theoretical models in real-world conditions. Meanwhile, 13 employees in Guadalajara tackle the same problems through machine learning and computational chemistry, creating digital twins and predictive models. This parallel approach—physical and computational teams attacking identical challenges with complementary methodologies—creates powerful validation loops that accelerate discovery.
"Technical founders often fall into a trap—do you have a solution to a problem you have not identified?"—David Arreaga, Ph.D.
“Each place has its own culture,” explains CEO David Arreaga, Ph.D., acknowledging the natural tension between different working styles. The computational team in Guadalajara operates like software developers, preferring flexible hours and a less rigid structure. The Dallas experimentalists, rooted in traditional chemistry and materials science, thrive with more structured daily routines. Rather than forcing uniformity, Ares Materials has found success in creating synchronization points that respect these cultural differences while ensuring alignment.
What binds these distributed teams together is their shared commitment to data-driven decision making and scientific rigor. The company operates with specifications that set targets for the entire organization, with all tasks and activities flowing from these empirical benchmarks. This scientific method approach ensures that whether insights emerge from a computational model in Guadalajara or a lab reaction in Dallas, they’re evaluated against the same evidence-based criteria.
The company’s recent evolution reflects the natural maturation of a technical startup. Co-founders David Arreaga and Adrian Avendano, Ph.D., friends for 16 years, have developed an intuitive division of labor that leverages their complementary strengths. David gravitates toward customer and investor relations, while Adrian manages technical operations. This natural specialization has reached a point where, as David notes, “most cases we don’t even need to talk about things, it’s understood.”
What binds these distributed teams together is their shared commitment to data-driven decision making and scientific rigor.
A key milestone came with the addition of Chief Marketing Officer Hyun Joong Kim in January 2024. With extensive experience at Corning, St. Gobain, and DuPont, Kim serves as a crucial bridge to Asia-Pacific markets, bringing native Korean cultural understanding and customer relationships that were previously inaccessible to the company.
With their recent Series B raise, Ares Materials is preparing for its next organizational evolution: bringing on a full-time Chief Financial Officer. This addition represents the company’s transition from survival mode to strategic growth, requiring sophisticated financial planning, investor communication, and contract management capabilities.
For technical founders contemplating similar journeys, the Ares Materials team offers hard-won wisdom: “Make sure you understand the problem you’re trying to solve,” warns David. “Technical founders often fall into a trap—do you have a solution to a problem you have not identified?” Their advice centers on following scientific principles: be data-driven, demand extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, and above all, play to your strengths while building a team that complements your capabilities.