CuspAI says materials discovery is the ‘single challenge’ holding back industrial progress – and it’s built a foundry of global partners to help solve it.

Cambridge-based start-up CuspAI has launched its ‘AI Materials Foundry’, a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise designed to speed up the discovery of new materials.

More than 45 founding partners have signed on, including Nvidia, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Henkel, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Lam Research, spanning the US, Asia-Pacific and Europe.

“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,” said co-founders Dr Chad Edwards and Prof Max Welling in a blog post announcing the initiative.

“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 launch comes alongside a $450m Series B funding round, led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA with significant participation from Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions – as previously flagged here at SiliconRepublic.com when the deal was in the works. The round values CuspAI at $2.6bn, up from $520m last September, and follows a Series A of more than $100m less than a year ago.

New investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, Britain’s Sovereign AI Venture Fund, the Netherlands’ Invest-NL and John Doerr, while existing backers Temasek, Basis Set Ventures, Giant Ventures, Touring Capital, Prosus, Phoenix Court and Northzone also returned.

Founded in 2024 by Edwards and Welling, CuspAI applies generative AI and molecular simulation to materials discovery. Kleiner Perkins partner Josh Coyne, who co-led the round, said what sets the pair apart is that “they design for materials that can actually be built, not just ones a model can dream up”, adding that he believes CuspAI’s technology “can define the AI-driven materials revolution”.

CuspAI is also growing its global footprint, with a new Singapore office joining hubs in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo and the US. John Giannandrea, formerly of Apple and Google, is helping build out its US operations, while Abhi Talwalkar, an AMD board member and chairman of Lam Research, joins the advisory board.

“The opportunity in front of us has never been more urgent, or more exciting,” Edwards and Welling said. “New materials can unlock performance, sustainability and new solutions to existing intractable problems.”