IIT Madras alumnus Akash Ramdas has co-founded Discovered Materials with fellow alumnus Advaith Sridhar to accelerate materials discovery using AI technology. The startup has successfully raised $9 million in seed funding in a round led by Lightspeed India Partners. The funding round also included participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, and notable angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar. As reported by TechCrunch, the $9 million seed funding will support the startup's efforts to develop its technology for discovering new materials, particularly focused on semiconductor applications. According to the latest reports, the funding will help the startup expand its team, laboratory capabilities and AI research agents, with the company working to make the discovery of new semiconductor materials faster and reduce the time required to move scientific research towards practical applications.
The startup addresses a critical challenge in the semiconductor industry where AI chips generate significant heat that requires materials capable of withstanding high temperatures. According to company reports, Discovered Materials uses AI agents and computational models to identify promising materials, enabling researchers to explore thousands of potential materials in a single day. This represents a significant improvement from the approximately 20 candidates that Ramdas examined daily during his doctoral research. The startup combines AI-generated material candidates with physics-based simulations to assess their potential, using AI models developed by Anthropic to generate potential materials that could help manage heat in high-performance semiconductor chips. Once candidates are identified, the company evaluates them through physics-based models and computational simulations to determine which ones show promise for further investigation. As reported on October 19, the company aims to speed up the materials discovery process using AI agents that can suggest potential materials and help researchers assess their properties through computer simulations and scientific models.
Ramdas completed his BTech in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering at IIT Madras in 2019 before moving to Stanford University where he pursued a master's degree in Materials Science and Engineering from 2019 to 2021. He continued his studies at Stanford, completing a PhD in Materials Engineering in June 2025. His doctoral research focused on computational approaches to discovering materials for nanoscale electronic devices, giving him experience in using modelling techniques to investigate materials with potential applications in electronics. Following his doctorate, Ramdas worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford from September 2025 to April 2026 before turning his research experience towards entrepreneurship, co-founding Discovered Materials in March 2026. His co-founder, Advaith Sridhar, studied at IIT Madras and Carnegie Mellon University, where he developed expertise in artificial intelligence, and also worked on AI systems at Persona AI and Luma Labs. Sridhar was awarded the best outgoing student of the IIT Madras batch graduation in 2019 and previously worked as a product manager at Flipkart and Turing.com, as well as being the founding AI Engineer at Persona AI.
The startup has introduced Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate how effectively AI systems tackle real-world materials discovery problems related to semiconductor chips. According to company reports, this initiative aims to assess the capabilities of AI in accelerating scientific research and provide a standardized approach for evaluating AI-driven materials discovery solutions. The company has also made hundreds of AI-discovered materials available and developed this benchmark to help evaluate the technology's performance and support further research in the field. However, as noted by TechCrunch, identifying a promising candidate through AI does not guarantee that it will work in practice, with AI-discovered materials yet to achieve widespread commercial use. The long-term progress of Discovered Materials will depend on whether the materials it identifies can deliver reliable results beyond computer simulations. The startup acknowledges that GPUs today handle heat fluxes of ~140 W/cm², higher than a space shuttle nose cone re-entering the earth's atmosphere, with each generation generating more heat than the last.
