CuspAI, a materials-discovery AI startup, has raised £335 million in a Series B led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with significant participation from Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions. The round values CuspAI at £2 billion and follows a £75 million-plus Series A, led by NEA and Temasek, less than a year ago. Proceeds will support faster expansion across the United States, APAC and Europe.
Across semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing, the constraint on progress is increasingly the materials themselves rather than the engineering, and many of the materials needed do not yet exist. CuspAI's platform, MIRA, addresses this by running full discovery cycles, from generative materials design through simulation, synthesis route planning and coordinated experimental validation. A partner defines a target, such as a compound with specific thermal stability or a semiconductor with a target bandgap, and MIRA generates candidate structures, predicts their properties at scale, designs synthesis routes matched to available labs, and feeds validated results back to sharpen the next cycle. Working with Finnish chemicals company Kemira, the platform screened a search space of 300 trillion potential molecular structures and delivered twenty validated novel candidates in six months, a process that had previously taken the customer years.
Founded in 2024 by Chad Edwards and Max Welling, CuspAI draws on Welling's work co-inventing the variational autoencoder and the equivariant neural network architectures now used in generative molecular design. Aron Walsh serves as chief scientific officer, and John Giannandrea, formerly of Google and Apple, is helping set up US foundry operations. The advisory board includes Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, former ASML president and CTO Martin van den Brink, and Abhi Talwalkar. Headquartered in Cambridge, the operation extends across London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore and the United States.
The raise accompanies the launch of CuspAI's AI Materials Foundry, a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise spanning the United States, Europe and APAC. More than 45 organisations have joined as founding members, including NVIDIA, which provides the compute infrastructure, and Meta's Fundamental AI Research team, whose Universal Model for Atoms underpins the simulation layer. CuspAI has also secured exclusive AI training rights to foundational materials-science datasets, including the Cambridge Structural Database via CCDC and the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database via FIZ Karlsruhe.
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. We're delighted to be joined by more than 45 leaders in their fields to advance materials discovery.
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. CuspAI built a search engine that changes that. What sets Max, Chad, and the team apart is that they design for materials that can actually be built, not just ones a model can dream up. I believe CuspAI's technology can define the AI-driven materials revolution, and Kleiner Perkins is thrilled to co-lead their Series B.
Accelerating materials discovery is one of the most critical challenges of our time, with profound implications across semiconductors, energy and advanced manufacturing. What sets CuspAI apart is their ability to bridge the gap between frontier AI and the physical world, winning them industry leaders as their early partners. Since NEA co-led the Series A, we've seen Chad and Max's relentless focus and ability to build a world-class team. We're proud to double down on our investment as CuspAI transforms how the world's most vital industries design and deploy next-generation materials.
Materials discovery has quietly been a bottleneck behind progress in energy, semiconductors, and climate. What's remarkable about Cusp is that a single AI platform is already solving hard problems across industries - from stripping forever chemicals from drinking water to designing next-generation chip materials. The shift to AI-led discovery is real, and Chad Edwards, Max Welling, and the team are at the forefront of unleashing unprecedented technological innovation.
