UK sovereign AI fund & Bezos back CuspAI in £335M Series B fund

Cambridge-based AI firm CuspAI has raised £335 million in funding in Series B round, with investment from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the UK’s sovereign AI fund.

The business, only two-years-old, is now valued at $2.6bn and aims to be the “search engine for rare materials.”

The funding round was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, supported by Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, Britain’s Sovereign AI Venture Fund, the Invest-NL and John Doerr.

The funding announcement aligns with CuspAI’s launch of the AI Materials Foundry, bringing together a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise for the design of new materials, orchestrated by a single agentic platform.

Over 45 organisations have joined as founding members,  including NVIDIA, who will provide the compute infrastructure, and Meta’s Fundamental AI Research Team, who develop the Universal Model for Atoms (UMA), a frontier atomistic chemistry model for materials science.

The collaboration seeks to end the materials bottleneck constraining progress. Semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing are among the industries facing the same challenge: while the engineering needed for innovation is well understood, the constraint is materials.

The Series B funding will allow CuspAI to expand internationally, with plans to open a new office in Singapore and increase the workforce across its offices in Cambridge, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo and the US.

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“If we don’t make progress fast, the next 50 years of industrial progress will be constrained by a single challenge: the world needs materials that don’t yet exist,” Dr Chad Edwards, CEO and co-founder of CuspAI, said.

“That’s what we’re on a mission to solve – combining frontier agentic AI with deep domain expertise, exclusive data access and close customer partnerships. We’re delighted to be joined by more than 45 leaders in their fields to advance materials discovery.”

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