CuspAI, a Cambridge-based AI materials discovery startup, has raised $450 million (approximately £330 million) in a Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, at a post-money valuation of $2.6 billion (approximately £2 billion); the round also marks the appointment of Professor Aron Walsh of Imperial College London as Chief Scientific Officer.

CuspAI was founded in March 2024 by Dr Chad Edwards and Professor Max Welling, headquartered in Cambridge, UK. Its platform applies generative AI to accelerate materials discovery by reversing the traditional scientific method: specifying desired properties first, then engineering the material to meet them. Revenue is not disclosed.

The $450 million Series B was co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Britain's Sovereign AI Venture Fund, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Temasek and Prosus, among others. The round represents a five-fold valuation increase from $520 million at September 2025's Series A in nine months. Total funding to date exceeds $650 million. Advisors: none mentioned.

Professor Walsh, Chair in Materials Design at Imperial College London's Department of Materials, joins as CSO, continuing his Imperial research in parallel. His work at Imperial spans computational AI approaches to solar cells, batteries, thermoelectrics and solid-state lighting.

The structural driver is the convergence of three previously separate industrial bottlenecks: semiconductor supply chain constraints, clean energy material scarcity, and the prohibitive timelines of conventional materials R&D, which typically spans a decade from discovery to deployment. AI-driven design compresses that timeline to months. This is why the AI Materials Foundry launch, a 45-member network including NVIDIA, Meta and the Henry Royce Institute, is commercially significant beyond the funding headline. It converts CuspAI from a research tool into a production pipeline with named industrial offtakers.

For the UK, the Sovereign AI Venture Fund's participation alongside Bezos Expeditions is the material signal: government capital co-investing with the world's most recognisable individual investor in a Cambridge-headquartered deep tech company is a deliberate statement about the UK's capacity to anchor frontier AI infrastructure outside the software layer.

The verdict: CuspAI's valuation trajectory reflects the market's recognition that physical AI, applied to atoms rather than tokens, is the next frontier, and this company has assembled the scientific credibility, industrial partnerships and capital base to lead it.

Source: tech.eu / qz.com / businesswire.com / imperial.ac.uk / sciencebusiness.net