Clean air and water, next-generation AI compute, and sustainable energy — these multi-billion-dollar global challenges share a common barrier: materials. CuspAI’s mission is to change that. In just a year, we’ve gone from a concept, to active partnerships with world leaders in automotive, semiconductors, energy, and climate.
Today, we reached another significant milestone, with the closure of our $100 million+ Series A funding round. The round was co-led by US fund New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Temasek, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Samsung Ventures, Hyundai Motor Group, and returning investors.
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Other firms participating include Basis Set Ventures, FJ Labs, Giant Ventures, LocalGlobe, Northzone, Prosus Ventures, Tiferes Ventures and Touring Capital.
Angel investors include Durk Kingma (OpenAI Co-Founder), Zoubin Ghahramani (Google VP Research), Arash Ferdowsi (Founder of Dropbox), Thomas Wolf (Founder of Hugging Face) and Victor Riparbelli (Founder and CEO of Synthesia).
Lila Tretikov, Partner and Head of AI Strategy at NEA and former Deputy CTO at Microsoft, who will join the CuspAI board, said:
Our platform acts like an AI ‘search engine’ for materials, enabling customers to specify the exact properties they need and generating new, synthesisable candidates up to 10x faster than traditional discovery methods. Our technology is materials agnostic, with potential for impact across multiple industries where breakthroughs can unlock billions in value.
This funding allows us to scale our platform and deliver transformative materials to market faster. We’re proud to have forged multi-sector partnerships in just one year spanning automotive, semiconductors, water purification and climate tech, including:
- Hyundai: A previously unannounced collaboration to work on sustainable energy applications
- Kemira: the Helsinki NASDAQ-listed public chemicals company, to work on PFAS removal
- Meta: to work on carbon capture — with a collaboration on the world’s largest direct air capture (DAC) database, ODAC25
- Additional partnerships still yet to be announced, including in the semiconductor sector
As part of CuspAI’s rapidly expanding commercialisation efforts, we’re also welcoming two globally recognised business leaders in semiconductors and energy to our board:
- Martin van den Brink, former President and CTO of ASML, a key architect of Europe’s semiconductor leadership
- Lord Browne, former BP CEO, Chair of the Francis Crick Institute, and current Chair of the UK Government’s Council for Science and Technology
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