Cambridge-based CuspAI raises £335m led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA
This article covers CuspAI, an AI startup focused on materials discovery, which has raised £335m in a growth funding round that values the startup at about £2bn. The funding will bankroll the launch of a global AI Materials Foundry and support faster expansion across the United States, APAC and Europe, supporting efforts to shorten materials discovery cycles for sectors such as energy, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing.
CuspAI, an AI startup focused on materials discovery, has raised £335 million in a growth funding round, valuing the company at about £2 billion. The cash will bankroll the launch of a global AI Materials Foundry and faster expansion across the United States, APAC and Europe, a move that underlines the growing commercial appetite for AI-led approaches to inventing new materials.
Why it matters
Many of the engineering challenges that define the next decade — cheaper carbon capture, next-generation semiconductors, cleaner water and novel manufacturing processes — hinge on materials that do not yet exist. CuspAI’s raise is significant because it funnels large-scale capital into a company attempting to shorten that discovery cycle with AI, experimental automation and curated datasets. If the platform delivers repeatable, buildable candidates at industrial scale, it could accelerate progress in multiple sectors simultaneously.
Inside the product
CuspAI’s central offering is MIRA, a platform that runs end-to-end materials discovery cycles. A partner specifies a target property — for example a compound with a particular thermal stability or a semiconductor with a set bandgap — and MIRA generates candidate structures, predicts properties at scale, proposes synthesis routes tailored to available labs, and integrates experimental validation to refine further cycles.
The company cites a customer engagement with Finnish chemicals firm Kemira in which MIRA screened a search space of around 300 trillion potential molecular structures and delivered 20 validated novel candidates in six months — a process the customer says previously took years. CuspAI also announced the AI Materials Foundry, a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise. Founding members include major compute partners and research contributors such as NVIDIA, which supplies compute infrastructure, and Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team, whose Universal Model for Atoms supports CuspAI’s simulation layer. CuspAI has 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.
Who are the investors?
The Series B was led by US venture firms Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with significant participation from Bezos Expeditions. The raise follows a Series A less than a year ago that exceeded £75 million and was co-led by NEA and Temasek. The round values CuspAI at around £2 billion and is intended to fund the company’s global foundry build-out and commercial partnerships.
In the announcement, Josh Coyne, Partner at Kleiner Perkins, said:
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.
In the announcement, Philip Chopin, Managing Director at NEA, said:
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.
In the announcement, John Doerr, Investor at Doerr Capital, said:
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.
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Founder perspective
CuspAI was founded in 2024 by Chad Edwards and Max Welling. Welling’s academic work includes co-inventing the variational autoencoder and equivariant neural network architectures that underpin many generative molecular design systems today. Aron Walsh is chief scientific officer, and former Google and Apple executive John Giannandrea is helping to establish US foundry operations. The advisory board features prominent names such as Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, former ASML president and CTO Martin van den Brink, and industry leader Abhi Talwalkar.
In the announcement, Chad Edwards, Co-founder & CEO, said:
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.
The bigger picture
CuspAI is part of a broader shift toward applying large-scale AI to scientific discovery. Its Cambridge headquarters and European offices place it in the region’s research ecosystem while the new funding will accelerate presence in the United States and APAC. The combination of exclusive dataset access, major compute partners and industrial customers signals a commercial approach that tries to bridge lab-scale experimentation and real-world manufacturability.
For the UK and European tech scene, the round underscores continued investor confidence in applied AI beyond pure software — particularly where AI can be tightly integrated with physical testing and industrial partners. If CuspAI’s foundry model scales, it could shorten product cycles across energy, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing, with knock-on benefits for domestic supply chains and industrial innovation.
They've invested in CuspAI
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| Investors | Investment Focus | Startup Investments | Round Size | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Kleiner Perkins( ) Menlo Park, US  | ||||
 NEA( ) Menlo Park, US | ||||
 Temasek( ) Singapore, Singapore | ||||
 Doerr Capital( ) | ||||
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