Jeff Bezos and the UK government-backed VC fund backing domestic AI startups have invested in a UK startup developing AI systems to discover and design new materials for clean energy and chipmaking in a $450m raise.
The $450m Series B funding round in Cambridge-based CuspAI values the startup at $2.6bn, which is a five-fold jump from its valuation in September last year when it raised $100m at a valuation of $520m. In total, the two-year-old startup has now raised more than $670m.
CuspAI today has confirmed details of the Series B round, some of which had previously been reported by the media. The round was co-led by US VCs Kleiner Perkins and NEA with “significant participation” from Bezos Expeditions, the Amazon founder’s family office.
Additional new investors in the round include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMDVentures, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund, the UK government-backed VC fund backing domestic AI startups.
Sovereign AI, which publicly launched this year, invests between £5m and £10m in UK AI startups. Existing investors in CuspAI, including Temasek, Basis Set Ventures, Giant Ventures, Phoenix Court and Northzone, also participated.
CuspAI, which counts AI bigwigs Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton as advisers, is using its technology to discover how to develop new physical materials for industries such as clean energy, the semiconductor industry, manufacturing, water treatment, and carbon capture.
It works as a kind of search engine, whereby its customers, which include ASML and Meta, indicate the properties they need, whether it be a semiconductor with a particular property or a material that captures carbon dioxide efficiently.
CuspAI says it will use the funding to help power its expansion across the US, APAC and Europe, including its new “AI Materials Foundry”.
It describes the “AI Materials Foundry” as a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise for the design of new materials.
Founding partners of the network, which aims to build software that helps researchers develop new materials quicker and cheaper, include Nvidia, Meta, Samsung and Hyundai, along with more than 40 other companies.
John Doerr, 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 platform is already solving hard problems across industries-from stripping forever chemicals from drinking water to designing next-generation chip materials.”
