CuspAI raises £75m Series A led by NEA and Temasek to accelerate AI-driven materials discovery

Cambridge-based CuspAI, the frontier AI company reimagining how the world discovers and develops new materials, today announced the close of its £75m Series A funding round.

The round was co-led by US fund NEA and Temasek, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Samsung Ventures, Hyundai Motor Group, and returning investors. Other firms participating include Basis Set Ventures, FJ Labs, Giant Ventures, LocalGlobe, Northzone, Prosus Ventures, Tiferes Ventures and Touring Capital.

Angel investors include Durk Kingma (OpenAI Co-Founder), Zoubin Ghahramani (Google DeepMind VP Research), Arash Ferdowsi (Founder of Dropbox), Thomas Wolf (Founder of Hugging Face) and Victor Riparbelli (Founder CEO of Synthesia).

CuspAI was founded in 2024 by Dr Chad Edwards, a chemist turned DeepTech entrepreneur who previously scaled quantum computing unicorn Quantinuum, and Prof. Max Welling, an AI pioneer and former Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research, and VP of Technology at Qualcomm.

The company offers a frontier AI platform pioneering the discovery of breakthrough materials to power human progress. Combining generative AI with advanced molecular and physics based simulations, CuspAI designs and validates materials in months rather than decades.

CuspAI’s platform acts like a search engine for materials, enabling customers to specify the exact properties they need and generating new, synthesisable candidates up to 10x faster than traditional discovery methods.

In its first year, the company has forged multi-sector commercial partnerships, including:

Hyundai: a collaboration to work on sustainable energy applications
Kemira: the Helsinki NASDAQ-listed public chemicals company, to work on PFAS removal
Meta: to work on carbon capture with a collaboration on the world’s largest direct air capture database, ODAC25
Additional partnerships still to be announced, including in the semiconductor sector

To support its commercialisation efforts, two globally recognised figures in semiconductors and energy will join CuspAI’s advisory board: Martin van den Brink, former President and CTO of ASML, and Lord John Browne, former BP CEO, Chair of the Francis Crick Institute, and current Chair of the UK Government’s Council for Science and Technology. They join existing advisors Prof Geoffrey Hinton, Prof Yann LeCun, Prof Kristin Persson and Verity Harding.

The Series A financing comes a year after CuspAI came out of stealth with a £22m seed round. CuspAI will now look to expand its global footprint, including scaling its operations in the US and Asia to serve increasing customer demand.

Next-generation AI compute, clean air and water and sustainable energy – these multi-billion-dollar global challenges share a common barrier: materials. CuspAI’s mission is to change that. In just a year, we’ve gone from concept to partnerships with world leaders in automotive, semiconductors, energy, and climate. This funding allows us to scale our platform and deliver transformative materials to market faster. We’re grateful for the support of our investors, and the strategic backing from our customers as we accelerate into our next phase of our growth.

Chad Edwards, Co-founder & CEO

AI’s most profound promise emerges when it moves beyond the everyday and becomes a catalyst for discovery, deepening our command of chemistry, biology, and physics, and accelerating the design of materials that redefine what is possible. CuspAI harnessed this power to shutter long-accepted engineering limits, enabling breakthroughs across industries that can elevate the quality of life for generations to come in months rather than decades.

Lila Tretikov, Partner at NEA

AI isn’t just promising a revolution in materials science, it’s already delivering one. By decoding the complexity of our material world, it’s starting to unlock breakthroughs from climate mitigation to faster, more efficient compute. With their unique approach and bold vision, the CuspAI team is well-positioned in this transformative space and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Brooke Seawell, Partner at NEA

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