CuspAI has been building AI “foundation models” that can make predictions about chemistry, much the way that large language models make predictions about language. It bills its technology as “a search engine for the material world.”
He said the company would use the money it has raised to continue to build out is team, which now consists of about 30 employees, and to open additional offices, with Asia a particular focus.
Lila Tretikov, a former deputy CTO at Microsoft who is now a partner at NEA and led the investment into CuspAI for that firm, said she was impressed by the pedigree of CuspAI’s team, the data sets it had access to, and how far along it was in building its foundation models compared to competitors. “At Microsoft, we used to say what really matters in breakthroughs in AI is scale and speed. And I think this team has both,” she told Fortune.
Edwards said that CuspAI has already shown that, with help from its foundation models, it can go from a customer’s request that it needs a material with certain properties to having a completely novel material meeting those customer specs within six months, a process he said might normally take a decade. He thinks the company may be able to cut even that time to just one to two months within the next two years.
While some previous attempts to apply AI to the generation of new materials have resulted in recipes for substances that are simply too difficult to manufacture, CuspAI had developed what Edwards says are “synthesis-aware generative AI models” that are more likely to produce materials that chemical companies can actually make.
He said CuspAI is pursuing a dual strategy of making materials to order for large partners as well as developing its materials for its own projects, although the emphasis so far has been on making materials to spec for partners. “In the early days, we thought, ‘let’s be commercial and find partners with clear problems and a clear route to market,’” he said.
The competition among chemistry and material science AI startups is rapidly heating up. And although Edwards did not say it explicitly, this competition may have also prompted it to raise a large, new investment round.
