UK backs $450M round in Cambridge AI startup CuspAI

Cambridge-based CuspAI announced it has raised $450 million in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the UK government, valuing the two-year-old company at $2.6 billion.

The company plans to use the funding to accelerate its AI platform for discovering new materials for semiconductors, batteries, energy systems and carbon capture, and to expand its research and engineering teams. CuspAI said it will scale operations in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, the United States and open a new office in Singapore.

The Series B follows a $100 million Series A completed last year. The UK government did not disclose the amount of its investment; its sovereign AI fund typically invests between £1 million and £10 million and requires recipient firms to keep their primary office in the UK and have British founders. CuspAI is the fourth company to receive backing from that fund.

Alongside the funding, CuspAI launched an AI Materials Foundry, a network of more than 45 technology companies, industrial groups and research organisations that links AI models with scientific data, laboratory facilities and cloud computing. Nvidia will provide computing infrastructure and Meta’s Fundamental AI Research group and Hyundai are among the partners.

CuspAI applies what it calls frontier agentic AI, systems designed to propose research tasks and manage experimental workflows. The platform integrates models, experimental data and lab automation to propose and validate candidate compounds and to seek alternatives to scarce elements such as iridium and ruthenium.

Co-founders Dr. Chad Edwards and Professor Max Welling wrote in a statement that without faster development of new materials, future industrial progress could be limited by materials that do not yet exist. Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, described materials science as “a bottleneck for future technologies” and characterized CuspAI’s platform as “a search engine” for undiscovered materials.