The Series B marks a five-fold jump in valuation for the AI materials-discovery startup in under a year, as it expands its “AI Materials Foundry” with partners including Nvidia, Meta, and Samsung.
Jeff Bezos and the UK government-backed venture fund for domestic AI startups have both invested in a UK startup developing AI systems to discover and design new materials for clean energy and chipmaking, in a $450 million funding round.
The Series B funding round in Cambridge-based CuspAI values the startup at $2.6 billion — a five-fold increase from its valuation in September last year, when it raised $100 million at $520 million. In total, the two-year-old startup has now raised more than $670 million.
CuspAI confirmed details of the Series B round, some of which had previously been reported by the media. The round was co-led by US venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with “significant participation” from Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon founder’s family office.
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Additional new investors in the round include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund, a UK government-backed venture fund supporting domestic AI startups.
Sovereign AI, which publicly launched this year, invests between £5 million and £10 million in UK AI startups. Existing CuspAI investors, including Temasek, Basis Set Ventures, Giant Ventures, Phoenix Court, and Northzone, also participated in the round.
CuspAI, which counts AI luminaries Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton as advisers, uses its technology to develop new physical materials for industries such as clean energy, semiconductors, manufacturing, water treatment, and carbon capture.
The platform works as a kind of search engine, where customers — including ASML and Meta — specify the properties they need, whether that’s a semiconductor with a particular property or a material that captures carbon dioxide efficiently.
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CuspAI says it will use the funding to power its expansion across the US, APAC, and Europe, including its new “AI Materials Foundry,” a global network of data, labs, compute, and scientific expertise for the design of new materials.
Founding partners of the network, which aims to build software that helps researchers develop new materials more quickly and cheaply, include Nvidia, Meta, Samsung, and Hyundai, along with more than 40 other companies.
John Doerr of Doerr Capital said, “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 chemicals forever from drinking water to designing next-generation chip materials.”
