CuspAI Raises $450M at a $2.6B Valuation and Launches an 'AI Materials Foundry' With Nvidia and Meta

CuspAI, the Cambridge, UK startup applying AI to the design of new materials, has raised $450 million in Series B funding at a $2.6 billion post-money valuation — a roughly fivefold jump from the $520 million it was worth in September 2025, and enough to push total funding past $650 million.

A crowded cap table

Kleiner Perkins and NEA led the round, joined by Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions, Glade Brook Capital, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Tru Arrow, StepStone, Britain's Sovereign AI Venture Fund, the Netherlands' Invest-NL and venture veteran John Doerr, alongside returning backers Temasek, Prosus, Basis Set and Giant Ventures. "Most big leaps in technology come down to a material," said Kleiner Perkins partner Josh Coyne.

The Materials Foundry

CuspAI paired the raise with the launch of an AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of more than 45 organizations including Nvidia, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group and Lam Research. The consortium's aim is to industrialize AI-driven materials discovery — screening candidate compounds computationally before any lab work — and to share that pipeline across chipmakers, carmakers and manufacturers.

Chasing chipmaking's scarce metals

Semiconductors dominate the agenda: CuspAI says they account for 80% of its research effort this year, concentrated on finding replacements for rare metals such as ruthenium and iridium that the industry depends on. Founded in 2024 by Dr. Chad Edwards, formerly of Quantinuum, and Professor Max Welling, a co-inventor of the variational autoencoder, the company says that in one project with the chemicals group Kemira it screened 300 trillion candidate structures and delivered 20 validated candidates in six months.

Bezos bets on atoms

Bezos's participation adds to a growing pattern of AI capital flowing from software toward the physical world — materials, chips and manufacturing inputs — where a single better compound can reset the economics of an entire industry. CuspAI is wagering that generative models can compress that discovery cycle from years to months.