- The Matter Machine has been given £4M in a pre-Series A round of funding, with IP Group acting as the lead.
- Gordon Sanghera, one of the co-founders of Oxford Nanopore, has accepted a position at Matter Machine to head its commercialisation strategy.
- CuspAI, a company competing with us and based in Cambridge, raised $450 million in July and has now reached a valuation of $2.6 billion.
Gordon Sanghera led Oxford Nanopore for over 20 years, taking the company from its origins as a university spinout to a London Stock Exchange listing with a market value of £3.4 billion.
He resigned as chief executive on March 2, and on October 12 he became a member of Matter Machine, a spinout from the University of Liverpool that just completed a £4 million pre-Series A funding round to focus on AI-driven materials discovery.
Matter Machine is located at the University of Liverpool’s Materials Innovation Factory, a facility funded by Unilever and costing £81 million. The company’s platform focuses on inorganic crystalline materials used in batteries and catalysts. It brings together AI prediction with experimental work and materials characterisation.
The oversubscribed funding round was led by IP Group, a science investor listed in London, with Northern Gritstone and the University of Liverpool Enterprise Fund also taking part, together with a group that includes Norrsken Evolve, LYVA Labs and the Northern Universities Venture Fund, which is managed by Parkwalk, the fund-management arm of IP Group.
The money will be used to expand the team, to develop the platform, and to establish contacts with commercial partners in various sectors.
Sanghera starts a new chapter
Sanghera founded Oxford Nanopore in 2005 as a spinout from the University of Oxford and has led the company since then. On March 2, he transferred his leadership to Francis Van Parys and will remain with the company as an adviser until early 2027.
Progress across a wide range of sectors is driven by materials innovation. Matter Machine combines outstanding scientific expertise, distinct technological capabilities, and a highly scalable commercial opportunity.
“Materials innovation underpins progress across multiple sectors from energy to manufacturing and electronics. Matter Machine brings together exceptional scientific expertise, unique technology capabilities and a highly scalable commercial opportunity,” said Sanghera.
Sanghera’s experience also illustrates how company valuations can vary. Oxford Nanopore was listed at about £3.4 billion. On October 2, the IP Group sold 10 million shares for around £21 million and said its remaining 7.23% stake was worth £151.5 million. As Tech Funding News points out, this implies a current market value of approximately £2.1 billion.
Oxford Nanopore has had a long association with IP Group, which has been its biggest shareholder since the 2021 listing and still holds a substantial stake. The company also supports businesses such as First Light Fusion and Hysata.
The professor behind the platform
Matt Rosseinsky set up Matter Machine. He has been a professor of inorganic chemistry at Liverpool since 1999, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008, was given an OBE in 2024, and was awarded the Royal Society’s Royal Medal for Physical Sciences.
In 2021, their group created an AI tool that identified four new materials, including a set of lithium-conducting solid-state compounds important for solid-state batteries. It is unclear whether the company has licensed this work.
Rosseinsky said that the combination of advanced materials science and artificial intelligence provides a powerful opportunity to transform how new materials are discovered, and that Matter Machine was set up to tap into that potential, enabling faster innovation and bringing forward materials that can support progress in a wide range of industries.
Matter Machine also collaborates with the AI Materials Hub for Innovation (AIM-HI), a university initiative intended to make the Liverpool City Region a centre for AI-driven materials research. Apoello, another spinout company in the field of AI materials which was set up in October 2025, raised £470,000 in February.
The statement says that Matter Machine is Northern Gritstone’s first investment made since the start of its association with Liverpool. The fund, based in Manchester and chaired by Lord Jim O’Neill, has £382M in capital and 51 portfolio companies, as TFN reported in April.
A £4M investment in a billion-dollar race
Matter Machine is now entering a field in which funding rounds are considerably bigger.
PitchBook data shows that AI companies involved in discovering new materials have raised more than $1.2 billion since 2025. Cambridge-based CuspAI has closed a $450 million Series B round at a $2.6 billion valuation and has raised over $650 million in total, with customers including ASML, Meta, Samsung, and Hyundai.
Periodic Labs, founded by former researchers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, raised a seed round of $300 million and was said to be in early discussions about a $7 billion valuation in March. In May, London-based Orbital Industries raised $50 million with Plural acting as the lead investor. On October 8, the Sussex spinout Universal Quantum announced it had raised a Series A round of over $100 million.
The field of AI-driven materials discovery is still in its early stages, and it is difficult to measure precisely. The market is expected to reach $536.4 million in 2024 before growing to $5.58 billion by 2034 at an annual growth rate of 26.4%.
A £4 million financing round is enough to put a team together and start contacting potential customers. The main challenge is whether a recipient of a Royal Medal, an experienced manager from one of Britain’s largest deeptech companies, and a group of university-connected investors will secure paying customers before more heavily funded competitors do.
