UK start-up CuspAI is set to raise $400m in a funding round that includes Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, according to the Financial Times.

When Turing Prize laurate Yann LeCun joined Nobel Laureate and Turing Prize winner Professor Geoffrey Hinton on CuspAI’s Advisory Board last year, the young materials science and AI start-up’s reputation as a ‘soonicorn’ only grew.

Now the Financial Times is reporting that the two-year old Cambridge-based start-up CuspAI has raised financing of $400m, which would quadruple its valuation to some $2.6bn, with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos among its backers.

CuspAI had been valued at just $520m in September of last year, so that is a significant jump for the company that applies generative AI to materials science research. The FT cites sources who say investors in this round  include Silicon Valley venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins and Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon founder’s family office. It says term sheets have been signed but that the deal is not yet closed.

Founded by Max Welling – a professor of machine learning at the University of Amsterdam and a pioneer of AI’s application to science – and serial founder Dr Chad Edwards, CuspAI got a shout out from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang as one of the UK start-ups to watch when he met with UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer last year.

And indeed Nvidia’s venture arm was among the backers in its Series A funding round of over $200m last year. The round was co-led by US fund New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Temasek, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Samsung Ventures, Hyundai Motor Group, and returning investors and angels.

CuspAI’s angel backers also form a bit of a ‘who’s who’ list, boasting Durk Kingma, OpenAI co-founder, Zoubin Ghahramani, Google VP of Research, Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox, and Thomas Wolf, founder of Hugging Face – among others.

Founded in 2024, CuspAI describes itself as “a frontier AI company that specialises in using generative AI and molecular simulation to accelerate the discovery of breakthrough materials for industrial applications across semiconductors, energy, and climate”.

It is one of several players looking to lead in this space, and it is little surprise that it caught the eye of Bezos, who himself is leading his own physical AI venture Prometheus, which raised some $10bn in April.

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