CuspAI Raises $450M with Bezos and UK Government Backing

CuspAI, a two-year-old British AI lab, has raised $450 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, valuing the company at $2.6 billion. The round includes significant participation from Jeff Bezos' Bezos Expeditions and the UK government's Sovereign AI Venture Fund, highlighting strong interest in AI-driven materials discovery. The startup also launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of over 45 companies including Nvidia and Meta, to pool data and computing power for designing new materials.

The mission

CuspAI aims to build a 'search engine for materials that don't exist yet' to overcome what it calls a materials bottleneck holding back progress in semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. Its AI platform, MIRA, runs the full discovery cycle from generative design to experimental validation. CuspAI claims it screened 300 trillion molecular structures for Finnish chemicals firm Kemira in six months—a task that previously took years Source: thenextweb.

Key details:

• Founding partners of the AI Materials Foundry include Nvidia (providing computing), Meta (simulation models), Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and Lam Research Source: thenextweb.
• New investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, and Invest-NL Source: cna.
• CuspAI has hired former Apple and Google executive John Giannandrea to lead US operations and added advisers including Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton and ASML's former CTO Martin van den Brink Source: thenextweb.

The UK government's backing is part of its Sovereign AI Venture Fund, which only invests in British-founded companies headquartered in the UK. 'CuspAI is putting the power of AI to work to help us tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the UK and the world,' said Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall Source: thenextweb.