AI Materials Foundry coalition launches with Nvidia, Meta, Hyundai

The $450 million Series B round values the two-year-old company at $2.6 billion, CuspAI said Monday. The company raised a $100 million Series A last year.

CuspAI’s co-founders, Dr. Chad Edwards and Prof. Max Welling, described the company’s mission in a statement: “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.”

The company has launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition including chipmaker Nvidia, Meta Platforms, and Hyundai, alongside more than 48 other tech companies, industrial firms, and research facilities. The coalition aims to build AI-powered software to discover and develop new materials for semiconductors and other industries.

“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,” said Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, which co-led the Series B round. “CuspAI built a search engine that changes that.”

CuspAI said it aims to cut research times and reduce or eliminate the use of rare metals including iridium and ruthenium in chipmakers’ supply chains. The company is also working with John Giannandrea, a former Apple and Google executive, to establish its US operations, and with Abhi Talwalkar, a board member at chipmaker AMD and chair of Lam Research.

The funding round marks the fourth investment by the UK government’s sovereign AI fund, which targets early-stage British AI firms. The government did not disclose the size of its investment. Criteria for receiving funding include having a main office in the UK and British founders. CuspAI has offices in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, and the US, and plans to open a new office in Singapore.

Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said: “CuspAI is putting the power of AI to work to help us tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the UK and the world today, such as energy and climate change. By backing British companies such as this we are paving the way for breakthroughs that are set to grow our economy, protect the natural world and improve everyone’s lives.”