Discovered Materials, a startup building AI agents to discover new materials for semiconductor chips, has raised $9 million (about ₹85 crore) in a seed round led by Lightspeed India Partners.Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners and angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar also participated in the round. The company will use the funding to expand its team and laboratory and scale its AI research agents.The startup has also released hundreds of materials identified using AI and launched Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark designed to test AI agents on real-world semiconductor material problems.The company is using AI to cut the time needed to identify and test new materials, with the aim of helping chipmakers improve performance while reducing power consumption and heat.It said its AI systems have developed new thermal materials in three months that match the performance of products that took some of the world’s largest chemical companies years to develop.“New materials are how we close that gap,” said co-founder Akash Ramdas, referring to the growing gap between computing power and energy efficiency.The startup was founded by IIT-Madras alumni Advaith Sridhar and Ramdas. Ramdas holds a PhD in materials science from Stanford University and has spent 11 years researching materials for semiconductor chips, while Sridhar studied AI at Carnegie Mellon University and previously worked on AI models and agents at Persona AI and Luma Labs.Published on August 11, 2026