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Kleiner Perkins is co-leading CuspAI’s $450 million Series B alongside NEA, per…

2026-07-20 · 16:17 UTC ·@josh_coyne ·1 min read

Brief

CuspAI is building a generative, simulation-driven platform for materials discovery and launched an AI Materials Foundry with 45+ partners (NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron). Kleiner Perkins is co-leading a $450M Series B with NEA to scale the global network; CuspAI says its agents propose, simulate, and validate makeable materials and are running live discovery programs.

Why it matters

Kleiner Perkins is co-leading CuspAI’s $450 million Series B alongside NEA, per the announcement.

Key details

  • CuspAI launched an AI Materials Foundry with 45+ founding partners, including NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai, Applied Materials, and Tokyo Electron, to pool data, labs, and compute.
  • CuspAI claims its platform is a 'search engine for materials' that generates novel candidate materials, simulates performance and synthesizability, runs live discovery programs against customer specs, and feeds synthesized experimental results back into its models.
Source evidence

🚨 New investment 🚨

We at @kleinerperkins are excited to co-lead @CuspAI's Series B.

Everything physical is a materials problem: chips, batteries, auto, aerospace, etc. Yet the materials we use today are a tiny fraction of what's chemically possible, and discovery still takes 10+ years of trial and error.

Biology went first: AlphaFold turned proteins into a search problem, and drug discovery reorganized around it. Chemistry never got its equivalent. CuspAI is building it: a search engine for materials that don't exist yet.

Describe the properties you need; its agents generate never-before-seen candidates and simulate not just how they perform, but whether they can actually be made. The platform is already in the field, running live discovery programs against real customer specs.

Additionally, CuspAI is launching its AI Materials Foundry today with 45+ founding partners incl. NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and more. Pooling data, labs, and compute. Every candidate synthesized and tested across the network feeds back into its models. Proprietary experimental data compounds with every partner.

In short, LLMs reshaped how we work with information. @acedwards1, @wellingmax, and the CuspAI team are going after atoms. We're excited to be in business with them on this noble pursuit.

They're hiring!

Kleiner Perkins (@kleinerperkins)

The next generation of semiconductors, batteries, clean energy systems, and advanced manufacturing will depend on materials that have yet to be discovered.

@cusp_ai is building the infrastructure to find them. Today, the company launched its AI Materials Foundry, a global network of data, labs, compute, and scientific expertise designed to accelerate the development of new materials.

We’re excited to co-lead CuspAI’s $450 million Series B alongside NEA and partner with @acedwards1, @wellingmax, and the @CuspAI team as they expand across the United States, Asia-Pacific, and Europe.

Hear more from @josh_coyne , Chad and Max ⬇️

Video

— https://nitter.net/kleinerperkins/status/2079205414139490719#m