CuspAI, a Cambridge-based company building an AI system for materials discovery, today announced its €393.2 million ($450 million) Series B funding round at a €2.2 billion ($2.6 billion) valuation and the launch of “AI Materials Foundry”, a global network to accelerate the design of new materials. The funding round was
Rahul Raj
CuspAI, a Cambridge-based company building an AI system for materials discovery, today announced its €393.2 million ($450 million) Series B funding round at a €2.2 billion ($2.6 billion) valuation and the launch of “AI Materials Foundry”, a global network to accelerate the design of new materials.
The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with significant participation from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions. Additional new investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, Britain’s Sovereign AI Venture Fund, the Netherlands’ Invest-NL and John Doerr. Existing investors Temasek, Basis Set Ventures, Giant Ventures, Touring Capital, Prosus, Phoenix Court and Northzone also participated. This round follows its €87.4 million+ (over $100 million) Series A funding round less than a year ago, led by NEA and Temasek.
Josh Coyne, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, said, “Most big leaps in technology come down to a material, and the next set, from cheaper carbon capture to semiconductors and cleaner water, is stuck waiting on materials nobody has discovered yet. CuspAI built a search engine that changes that. What sets Max, Chad, and the team apart is that they design for materials that can actually be built, not just ones a model can dream up. I believe CuspAI’s technology can define the AI-driven materials revolution, and Kleiner Perkins is thrilled to co-lead their Series B.”
Founded in 2024 by Dr. Chad Edwards and Prof. Max Welling, CuspAI aims to harness AI to deliver trillion-dollar materials breakthroughs in months. According to the company, its platform acts like an AI “search engine” for materials, enabling customers to specify the exact properties they need and generating new, synthesisable candidates up to 10x faster than traditional discovery methods.
CuspAI’s proprietary AI platform, MIRA, is central to the network, allowing partners to conduct complete discovery processes, including generative material design, simulation, synthesis route planning, and aligned experimental validation. The platform is underpinned by the largest curated experimental materials datasets in the world.
The company notes that AI Materials Foundry brings together a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise for the design of new materials, orchestrated by a single agentic platform.
More than 45 organisations have joined as founding members, including NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Henkel, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Lam Research, across the United States, Asia-Pacific and Europe.
NVIDIA is responsible for providing the compute infrastructure, and Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Team, which develops the Universal Model for Atoms (UMA), a frontier atomistic chemistry model for materials science.
CuspAI states that the collaboration seeks to end the materials bottleneck constraining progress. Semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing are among the industries facing the same challenge: while the engineering needed for innovation is well understood, the constraint is materials.
“If we don’t make progress fast, the next 50 years of industrial progress will be constrained by a single challenge: the world needs materials that don’t yet exist. That’s what we’re on a mission to solve – combining frontier agentic AI with deep domain expertise, exclusive data access and close customer partnerships. We’re delighted to be joined by more than 45 leaders in their fields to advance materials discovery,” said Dr. Chad Edwards, CEO and co-Founder, CuspAI.
CuspAI explained that software-led materials discovery requires four things: high-quality training data at scale, to make AI predictions reliable; compute powerful enough to screen at molecular resolution across billions of candidates; synthesis infrastructure to move from digital design to physical reality; and domain expertise to interpret what the machine finds and know what to do with it.
The British company claims that AI Materials Foundry assembles all four, for the first time, providing the production infrastructure for industrial materials discovery. Rather than relying on the physical constraints of a single, isolated laboratory, CuspAI’s ecosystem approach creates a compounding intelligence loop: breakthroughs achieved within the network have the potential to accelerate discovery timelines across the entire global value chain.
One Foundry project already underway is a new multi-year partnership between CuspAI and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore’s lead public sector R&D agency. The collaboration will combine AI-driven discovery with autonomous synthesis capability across semiconductors, carbon capture and advanced electronics.
CuspAI has raised over $650 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Temasek, NVentures, Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, and Hyundai Motor Group. It exited stealth mode with a €26.2 million ($30 million) Seed round announced in June 2024.
It plans to continue to grow its team, with a new office in Singapore and people in Cambridge, England, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo and the United States. Its advisory board includes Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton; former President and CTO of ASML, Martin van den Brink; and AMD Board Member & Chairman of Lam Research, Abhi Talwalkar.
