CuspAI, a two-year-old British startup, has raised $450 million in Series B financing led by venture firms Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with significant participation from Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon founder's family office. According to latest reports, this funding gives the startup a $2.6 billion valuation, representing a five-fold jump from its $520 million valuation in September last year when it raised $100 million. The Cambridge, UK-based company has now raised more than $670 million in total funding, with additional investors including Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMDVentures, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, the UK's Sovereign AI Fund, Netherlands' Invest-NL, and John Doerr. The UK government-backed VC fund, which publicly launched this year, invests between £5m and £10m in UK AI startups, making CuspAI the fourth company backed by the government's Sovereign AI Venture Fund. As reported by Reuters, the funding came with the launch of the AI Materials Foundry, demonstrating the company's commitment to scaling its AI materials discovery platform.
On Monday, CuspAI launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of more than 45 technology giants, industrial firms and research facilities. As reported by Reuters, the founding partners include Nvidia Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Lam Research. The network now includes more than 40 companies as founding partners, with the company describing it as a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise for material design. Nvidia is supplying the computing muscle, while Meta's research lab is contributing a model built to simulate atoms. The funding will support labs with foundry partners in Cambridge, Singapore and the San Francisco Bay area. John Doerr of Doerr Capital noted that "Materials discovery has quietly been a bottleneck behind progress in energy, semiconductors, and climate. What's remarkable about Cusp is that a single platform is already solving hard problems across industries-from stripping forever chemicals from drinking water to designing next-generation chip materials."
According to Reuters, 80% of CuspAI's efforts this year will focus on semiconductors. The company aims to reduce or eliminate the use of rare metals with supply-chain risks, such as ruthenium and iridium, in chipmaking. Chad Edwards explained that chipmakers and semiconductor suppliers are "frantically searching for new materials," with severe shortages of semiconductors, particularly in memory chips, affecting tech companies. CuspAI works as a search engine-like platform, where customers including ASML and Meta indicate the properties they need, whether it be a semiconductor with particular properties or materials that capture carbon dioxide efficiently. The startup has hired John Giannandrea, a former Google and Apple executive, to work part-time setting up the startup's California outpost. Tokyo Electron, a big chipmaking-tool supplier, acknowledged that the Foundry "could disrupt the current business model in the industry."
As reported by Reuters, CuspAI has assembled a strong advisory board including Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, two pioneers of modern AI techniques. The company also named Abhi Talwalkar, a semiconductor veteran and director of Advanced Micro Devices Inc, to its board, with AMD's venture unit joining the latest financing round. Max Welling, the other co-founder, is a respected AI researcher. The startup's technology is used to discover how to develop new physical materials for industries such as clean energy, semiconductors, manufacturing, water treatment, and carbon capture. The company has secured exclusive AI-training rights to some of the field's foundational chemistry databases, giving it a competitive edge in material discovery. CuspAI is also working with Abhi Talwalkar, a board member at chip maker AMD and chair of Lam Research. The company is growing its global footprint with new offices in Singapore joining existing hubs in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo and the US.
According to Reuters, CuspAI has already faced challenges in material discovery, working with researchers from Meta to find new materials for carbon dioxide capture. The startup started with 300 trillion possible structures within metal organic frameworks and narrowed it to 10 candidates, but was only able to synthesize 6 out of 10, with none outperforming commercially available options. Despite these setbacks, Edwards emphasized the dramatic improvement over typical industry timelines, with the startup completing this process in six months. The company is now using similar processes to find new materials capable of removing toxic chemicals from water, with Kemira Oy planning to synthesize and test 20 new structures this year. The funding will help power CuspAI's expansion across the US, APAC and Europe, including its new AI Materials Foundry. Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, stated that "CuspAI is putting the power of AI to work to help us tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the UK and the world."
