Jeff Bezos has joined forces with the UK government to back a British artificial intelligence startup valued at $2.6 billion, betting that the Cambridge-based firm can solve one of the most pressing bottlenecks facing global technology: the desperate need for new materials that do not yet exist.
CuspAI, founded just two years ago by Dr Chad Edwards and Professor Max Welling, has raised $450 million in a Series B funding round co-led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. The investment values the company at roughly £2 billion and includes backing from Bezos alongside the government’s sovereign AI fund, making CuspAI only the fourth company to receive support from the state-backed vehicle designed to help early-stage British AI firms scale internationally.
The startup has positioned itself as a search engine for rare materials, using frontier AI models to discover and develop new substances that could transform industries from semiconductor manufacturing to electric vehicles. It has assembled an influential coalition of more than 48 partners — including Nvidia, Meta and Hyundai — under what it calls the AI Materials Foundry, with the ambition of slashing research times and reducing or eliminating reliance on scarce metals such as iridium and ruthenium in chip supply chains.
Edwards and Welling argue that without rapid progress, half a century of industrial advancement risks being throttled by material shortages nobody has yet solved for. The funding will allow CuspAI to open a new office in Singapore and expand its workforce across Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo and the United States, where former Apple and Google executive John Giannandrea is helping establish operations.
Science and technology secretary Liz Kendall said backing companies like CuspAI would pave the way for breakthroughs capable of growing the economy while addressing challenges such as energy security and climate change. Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, was blunter about the stakes: most big leaps in technology come down to a material, he said, and the next set of them is stuck waiting on discoveries that have not yet been made.