Deep-tech startup Discovered Materials has raised $9 million (Rs 85 crore) in a seed funding round led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners and global angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar.
The fresh funds will be used to expand the team and laboratory and scale its AI research agents, Discovered Materials said in a press release.
Founded by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, Discovered Materials is an AI-driven deep-tech startup focused on thermal dissipation challenges in AI chips, which can generate more than 140W/cm². The company is developing thermally conductive dielectric materials for 3D chip packaging.
The startup operates cloud-based autonomous AI agents that run thousands of virtual material hypotheses daily using custom model harnesses incorporating frontier AI models. The AI-generated material candidates are then evaluated through physics simulations to assess their stability, dielectric constants and thermal properties.
Discovered Materials has also launched the Material Discovery Bench to evaluate how frontier AI systems perform on real-world semiconductor material challenges. The startup plans to patent promising material candidates and license the resulting thermal management and semiconductor technologies to global chipmakers.
According to the company, its AI systems have developed new thermal materials in three months with performance comparable to products that took years to develop.
Indian deep-tech startups continue to attract investor interest, with recent funding spanning AI, mobility, healthcare and energy technologies. Bengaluru-based E3 Electric.Ai raised Rs 100 crore in a Series A round led by BluVenture Holdings to develop and commercialise its AI-powered electric scooter, E3 TRION.
Meanwhile, eNLife Research raised Rs 6 crore in a seed round led by Piper Serica VC Fund to develop an AI-driven blood-based diagnostic platform for the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.
Deep-tech startups in India had raised $1.62 billion across 140 equity rounds by July 2026.