CuspAI is applying AI foundation models to one of science's slowest processes: discovering new materials. Where novel materials have historically taken years or decades to find, CuspAI aims to compress that to months by training models that can predict chemistry and generate candidate materials with desired properties on demand, billing its technology as a search engine for the material world.
The company's first focus has been materials for direct air capture of carbon dioxide, a critical climate technology, but its platform targets a broad range of industrial and sustainability challenges. CuspAI has established partnerships including Meta on carbon capture, Hyundai on sustainable energy, and Kemira on PFAS removal.
Founded in 2024 in Cambridge, UK, CuspAI was co-founded by CEO Dr. Chad Edwards, a chemist and deep-tech entrepreneur who previously helped scale quantum company Quantinuum, and CTO Professor Max Welling, a leading machine-learning researcher and former Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. Its advisors include AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.
In September 2025, CuspAI raised a $100 million-plus Series A co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Temasek at a reported $520 million valuation, with participation from NVIDIA's NVentures, Samsung, and Hyundai, plus angels including OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma and Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf.
CuspAI positions itself at the intersection of AI and materials science, aiming to industrialize on-demand materials discovery for climate and industrial applications.