CuspAI, a London-based startup applying AI to materials discovery, has raised more than $100 million in Series A funding just a year after launching from stealth.
The round was co-led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Temasek, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture arm), Samsung Ventures, Hyundai Motor Group, and returning investors. Other participants include Basis Set Ventures, FJ Labs, Giant Ventures, LocalGlobe, Northzone, Prosus Ventures, Tiferes Ventures, and Touring Capital.
Notable angel investors in the round include OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma, Google VP of Research Zoubin Ghahramani, Dropbox founder Arash Ferdowsi, Hugging Face founder Thomas Wolf, and Synthesia CEO Victor Riparbelli.
“AI’s most profound promise emerges when it becomes a catalyst for discovery, deepening our command of chemistry, biology, and physics” said NEA partner Lila Tretikov, who will join CuspAI’s board. “CuspAI harnessed this power to shutter long-accepted engineering limits, enabling breakthroughs across industries that can elevate the quality of life for generations to come.”
CuspAI’s platform functions as a search engine for materials, allowing customers to specify desired properties and generate synthesizable candidates up to 10x faster than conventional methods. In its first year, the company has signed partnerships with Hyundai for sustainable energy applications, Kemira for PFAS removal, and Meta for carbon capture, including work on the ODAC25 direct air capture database.
The company is also adding semiconductor veteran Martin van den Brink, former president and CTO of ASML, and John Browne, former BP CEO, to its board. They join existing advisors Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, both Turing Award winners.
Samsung Ventures, NEA, and Hyundai executives cited CuspAI’s potential to accelerate advances across climate, compute, and clean energy. Kemira CEO Antti Salminen said the company is already collaborating with CuspAI on removing so-called “forever chemicals” from water supplies.
CuspAI plans to use the funding to expand operations in the U.S. and Asia while scaling its platform to deliver next-generation materials for industries including energy, semiconductors, and environmental technologies.
