Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and the UK government have invested in a £2bn British artificial intelligence startup that is aiming to become the “search engine for rare materials” that accelerates the next wave of technological breakthroughs.
The Cambridge-based CuspAI has raised $450m (£330m) in funding from investors including Bezos and the government’s sovereign AI fund, valuing the two-year-old business at $2.6bn.
The company has launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of more than 48 tech companies, industrial firms and research facilities, with the aim of building software underpinned by artificial intelligence to discover and develop new materials for chipmakers and other industries.
CuspAI hopes to significantly cut research times and reduce or eliminate the use of rare metals – including iridium and ruthenium – in chipmakers’ supply chains.
The coalition, which includes the chipmaker Nvidia, the Facebook and Instagram owner, Meta Platforms, and the carmaker Hyundai, aims to use frontier AI, the most advanced, general-purpose artificial intelligence models, to discover new materials that could make energy networks and batteries more efficient and advance the power of semiconductors that underpin the AI revolution.
“If we don’t make progress fast, the next 50 years of industrial progress will be constrained by a single challenge: the world needs materials that don’t yet exist,” said the CuspAI co-founders Dr Chad Edwards and Prof Max Welling. “That’s what we’re on a mission to solve – combining frontier agentic AI with deep domain expertise, exclusive data access and close customer partnerships. The world simply can’t make the progress it needs to with known materials, that much is clear.”
The company said the round of series B funding would enable it to expand internationally, opening a new office in Singapore and increasing staff numbers in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo and the US.
Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm that co-led the latest round of funding, said: “Most big leaps in technology come down to a material, and the next set, from cheaper carbon capture to semiconductors and cleaner water, is stuck waiting on materials nobody has discovered yet. CuspAI built a search engine that changes that.”
The latest fundraise followed a $100m series A investment last year.
CuspAI is the fourth company to receive funding from the government’s fund targeting investment in early-stage British AI firms to help them scale up to compete on the world stage. The government did not disclose the size of the investment.
Criteria for receiving funding from the sovereign AI fund, which makes a typical equity investment in a startup of between £1m and £10m, include having a main office in the UK and the company’s founders being British.
Liz Kendall, the science and technology secretary, said: “CuspAI is putting the power of AI to work to help us tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the UK and the world today, such as energy and climate change. By backing British companies such as this we are paving the way for breakthroughs that are set to grow our economy, protect the natural world and improve everyone’s lives.”
CuspAI has brought on board John Giannandrea, a former Apple and Google executive, who is helping set up its US operations.
The company is also working with Abhi Talwalkar, a board member at chip maker AMD and chair of Lam Research.
