CuspAI, a British AI startup that works on materials discovery, is in discussions to raise at least $200 million, according to Bloomberg. While no term sheet has been signed yet, the deal could bring CuspAI’s valuation above $1 billion.
In September 2025, CuspAI raised more than $100 million in a Series A round co-led by NEA and Temasek, which valued the company at about $520 million. Later, new commercial contracts helped increase the valuation to around $800 million before this latest round.
Finding new materials such as advanced semiconductors, sustainable battery chemistries, or PFAS-filtering compounds has usually taken a decade or more with trial-and-error methods. AI models trained on large materials datasets can speed up this process, but building these models and datasets often takes years. CuspAI is now bringing this technology to market.
CuspAI was founded in 2024 in Cambridge, UK, by Dr Chad Edwards, a chemist and DeepTech entrepreneur who previously helped grow the quantum computing company Quantinuum, and Professor Max Welling, an AI expert who was a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research and VP of Technology at Qualcomm.
CuspAI calls its platform “a search engine for the material world.” Users can enter the material properties they need, such as strength, conductivity, or thermal tolerance, and the system suggests possible chemical compositions up to ten times faster than traditional methods.
The company has developed generative AI models that are aware of synthesis, so they create materials that can actually be manufactured, not just simulated. CuspAI’s partners include Meta, Kemira, and Hyundai Motor Group.
CuspAI operates in a fast-changing field, working with companies such as Schrödinger, which uses physics-based simulation for drug and materials discovery, PhaseCraft, and PASQAL. The company keeps a strategic edge with its proprietary datasets and synthesis-aware model design.
CuspAI plans to use the new funding to grow its platform, hire more staff, and expand in the US and Asia to meet increasing customer demand. The company expects its two-part business strategy, such as custom materials for enterprise partners and in-house development, to accelerate as the platform and its datasets improve.
