A two-year-old startup just convinced Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Meta, and Samsung that the future of AI chips isn’t about designing better processors. It’s about discovering entirely new materials to build them from.
CuspAI closed a $450 million Series B funding round on July 20, bringing its valuation to $2.6 billion and its total funding past $580 million. The round was co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with Bezos Expeditions, AMD Ventures, and the UK Government’s Sovereign AI Venture Fund also participating. For a company founded in 2024 in Cambridge, UK, that’s a remarkable trajectory, from a $30 million seed round in June 2024 to a $100 million Series A in September 2025, and now this.
The AI Materials Foundry play
Alongside the funding news, CuspAI unveiled what it calls the “AI Materials Foundry,” a coalition of over 45 founding partners that reads like a who’s who of companies that actually build the physical infrastructure powering the AI boom. Nvidia, Meta, Samsung, Applied Materials, and Hyundai are all on the list.
The premise is deceptively simple. Discovering new materials for semiconductors, clean energy systems, and advanced manufacturing currently takes years of lab work. CuspAI wants to compress that timeline to weeks or months using generative AI and advanced simulations. In English: instead of scientists mixing compounds by hand and hoping something works, AI models predict which molecular combinations will produce the properties engineers need.
