I’d known for a long time that I wanted to start a company applying AI to materials science, then early last year, everything came together. My co-founder, leading AI researcher, Professor Max Welling, and I were both ready to join forces and start something new. We have quite different backgrounds but share the belief that there are urgent, difficult challenges facing the world today, from climate change to sustainable energy, but advances in AI could make it possible to deliver meaningful change.
We incorporated the Cusp.ai in March 2024, announced our fundraise and Meta as the first partner in June, and had the founding team in place including board advisor (and now Nobel Laureate) Professor Geoffrey Hinton, by September.
Tell us about the business – what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers and so on?
Our mission is to build the breakthrough materials needed to power human progress. The CuspAI platform is a ‘search engine’ for next-generation materials. It generates and analyses material properties 10x faster and with a projected 90% success rate. To put that into perspective, the status quo has a success rate of around 6%, and it takes a decade and several hundred million dollars to develop a new material.
Known materials are no match for the challenges we face. It took millennia for them to be developed by nature—we believe we can reduce that to months. We’ve signed our first industry and research partnerships and our first challenges include finding materials to drive down the cost of carbon capture and to develop advanced semiconductors.
How has the business evolved since its launch?
We came out of stealth in June last year and announced our $30M seed round. Since then, we’ve built a strong early team and advisors, we believe it to be one of the most cited founding groups in the world. Today, we have around 25 of the very best at the intersection of chemistry, ML and engineering coming from companies such as Isomorphic Labs, Deepmind, Dassault Systèmes and beyond.
Collaboration is going to be key to driving impact at scale. We’ve started working with strategic partners including Meta, and others we hope to announce later this year.
Tell us about the working culture at CuspAI?
We’re all here because we’re excited by the mission. Great talent can work anywhere—everyone on the team chose CuspAI because they want to solve problems they care deeply about. We aim to merge the energy of startup culture, the curiosity and rigour of academia but with a heavy focus on commercialisation and real world impact.
Max and I talk a lot about the culture and how to maintain it as we scale. We believe you can combine Silicon Valley-level ambition with European values. We’re proud to be inclusive and multidisciplinary. Some in the Valley wear their lack of interest in inclusion as a badge of honour. It’s distressing but it’s their loss.
How are you funded?
We’re backed by leading VC firms including Hoxton Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Our $30M seed round was one of Europe’s largest last year, which set us up to progress quickly.
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how have you overcome this?
Staying laser-focused while moving multiple things forward at the same time. As a founder, you wear 100 different hats and I feel acutely aware of how many problems and markets we could pursue. You need to know when to switch mode and how to prioritise. For CuspAI, that means having clear goals and a plan for how to pursue them. What’s the most effective path to delivering impact and how fast can we learn and iterate?
How does CuspAI answer an unmet need?
The reality is that the world is facing unprecedented challenges, not least climate change, which is on track to negatively impact 3.5 billion people by 2050. There’s no cavalry coming. Gradual policy changes won’t get us there and known materials aren’t up to the job. We urgently need to find new, effective, materials and there is a huge addressable market for those able to deliver. Direct air capture, for example, could drastically cut emissions, but the current materials used are inefficient and don’t scale. The main barrier to mass adoption is cost. If we can drive down the cost per tonne below $150 it becomes a lot more realistic to implement at scale. Another example is the soaring compute demands of AI. Companies in this space want to discover new materials for high performance chips.
What’s in store for the future?
We believe we’re entering the ‘precision materials era’ with solutions that can be tailored to the specific needs of almost any industry, which is incredibly exciting. The opportunity is very, very large. We want to see CuspAI materials applied across multiple sectors from energy storage, to semiconductors to water purification. If we can capture carbon at scale, it becomes a valuable resource for new sustainable fuels or feedstocks. We want to have a measurable, positive impact.
What one piece of advice would you give other founders or future founders?
As a founder, you need a strong vision, but shouldn’t be scared to interrogate your plans with people you respect and trust. Engage advisors that bring different perspectives and can see the opportunity when you can’t. It’s why we’ve built CuspAI to be so interdisciplinary and why we’re building a small advisory board alongside Prof Hinton to extend and challenge our thinking.
And finally, a more personal question! What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
Last year was a whirlwind: raising a young family, raising funds, building a team. There wasn’t much of a routine, it was more like purposeful chaos! The gamechanger over the last few months has been building out the office in Cambridge (we also have people in Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Lausanne and Berlin). Rules to live by? I do what I do because of my kids. I want to be able to look them in the eye in 20 years and say, I stepped up to find solutions and changed our trajectory.
Chad Edwards is the cofounder and CEO of CuspAI.
