Jeff Bezos and UK government invest in £2bn British startup CuspAI

Nvidia's Groq 3 chip. The firm is part of coalition launched by CuspAI that aims to build software to discover and developed new materials for chipmakers. Photograph: Max A Cherney/Reuters View image in fullscreen Nvidia's Groq 3 chip. The firm is part of coalition launched by CuspAI that aims to build software to discover and developed new materials for chipmakers. Photograph: Max A Cherney/Reuters Jeff Bezos and UK government invest in £2bn British startup CuspAI Company aims to develop AI software that cuts research times and use of rare metals in chipmakers’ supply chains Business live – latest updates Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos , and the UK government have invested in a £2bn British artificial intelligence startup that is aiming to become the “search engine for rare materials” that accelerates the next wave of technological breakthroughs. The Cambridge-based CuspAI has raised $450m (£330m) in funding from investors including Bezos and the government’s sovereign AI fund, valuing the two-year-old business at $2.6bn. The company has launched the AI Materials Foundry, a coalition of more than 48 tech companies, industrial firms and research facilities, with the aim of building software underpinned by artificial intelligence to discover and develop new materials for chipmakers and other industries. CuspAI hopes to significantly cut research times and reduce or eliminate the use of rare metals – including iridium and ruthenium – in chipmakers’ supply chains. The coalition, which includes the chipmaker Nvidia, the Facebook and Instagram owner, Meta Platforms, and the carmaker Hyundai, aims to use frontier AI, the most advanced, general-purpose artificial intelligence models, to discover new materials that could make energy networks and batteries more efficient and advance the power of semiconductors that underpin the AI revolution. “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,” said the CuspAI co-founders Dr Chad Edwards and Prof Max Welling. “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. The world simply can’t make the progress it needs to with known materials, that much is clear.” The company said the round of series B funding would enable it to expand internationally, opening a new office in Singapore and increasing staff numbers in Cambridge, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo and the US. Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm that co-led the latest round of funding, said: “Most big leaps in technology come down to a material, and the next set, from cheaper carbon capture to semiconductors and cleaner water, is stuck waiting on materials nobody has discovered yet. CuspAI built a search engine that changes that.” The latest fundraise followed a $100m series A investment last year. CuspAI is the fourth