Cambridge-based CuspAI closed a $450 million Series B funding round at a $2.6 billion valuation on Monday, with backing from Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions and the UK government’s Sovereign AI Venture Fund. The two-year-old startup builds what it calls a “search engine for rare materials,” using agentic AI to discover compounds that don’t yet exist for semiconductor manufacturing, energy storage, and carbon capture.

Kleiner Perkins and NEA co-led the round. Additional new investors include Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, the Netherlands’ Invest-NL, and John Doerr personally, according to the company’s announcement. Existing backers Temasek, Basis Set Ventures, Giant Ventures, Prosus, and Northzone also participated. The round follows a $100 million Series A less than a year ago, co-led by NEA and Temasek.

The AI Materials Foundry

Alongside the funding, CuspAI launched what it calls the AI Materials Foundry: a coalition of more than 48 tech companies, industrial firms, and research facilities committed to using AI for materials discovery. Founding partners include Nvidia, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Henkel, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and Lam Research, as reported by The Guardian.

The coalition’s stated goal is reducing or eliminating dependence on rare metals like iridium and ruthenium in chipmaker supply chains. CuspAI’s AI agents reason over proprietary datasets and published research to identify candidate materials, then validate whether those candidates can actually be manufactured.

“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,” Josh Coyne, partner at Kleiner Perkins, told The Guardian. “CuspAI built a search engine that changes that.”

Strategic Backing

CuspAI is the fourth company to receive funding from the UK’s Sovereign AI Venture Fund, which targets early-stage British AI firms with typical equity investments between £1 million and £10 million. Criteria include having a UK main office and British founders. The government did not disclose its investment size.

UK science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said the company 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,” per The Guardian.

The company also announced two senior hires: John Giannandrea, former Apple and Google executive, is helping establish US foundry operations. Abhi Talwalkar, AMD board member and chairman of Lam Research, joined as an advisory board member.

The Agent Architecture Play

CuspAI’s co-founders Dr. Chad Edwards and Prof. Max Welling describe their approach as “combining frontier agentic AI with deep domain expertise, exclusive data access and close customer partnerships,” according to the company blog.

The distinction from traditional computational chemistry software is the agent layer. Rather than running fixed simulations, CuspAI’s system deploys AI agents that iteratively search, reason about, and evaluate material candidates across multiple constraint dimensions: manufacturing feasibility, supply chain availability, performance benchmarks, and cost. The company positions this as a shift from modeling known materials to discovering unknown ones.

John Doerr, who invested personally, framed the opportunity in the company’s announcement: “Materials discovery has quietly been a bottleneck behind progress in energy, semiconductors, and climate. What’s remarkable about Cusp is that a single AI platform is already solving hard problems across industries, from stripping forever chemicals from drinking water to designing next-generation chip materials.”

CuspAI now operates offices in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, and the United States.