CuspAI, a startup developing AI models for chemistry that counts several AI luminaries among its scientific advisors, has raised $100 million in new venture capital funding.
The funding round, the company’s Series A, was led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek. Nvidia’s venture capital arm NVentures, Samsung Ventures, and Hyundai Motor Group also participated in the financing, along with a number of venture capital firms and angel investors who had previously backed the company.
The funding round values CuspAI at $520 million, one source familiar with the deal said. CuspAI declined to comment on its valuation.
CuspAI, which has hired staff from leading AI labs, including Google DeepMind and Meta, is among several AI startups hoping to use the technology to discover how to develop new physical materials, from more efficient batteries, to new kinds of semiconductor and superconductors, to substitutes for plastic that are more sustainable.
As well as investing in CuspAI, Hyundai said it was partnering with the startup on “sustainable energy applications.”
“With CuspAI as our partner, we will leverage the power of AI to advance our performance and sustainability goals,” Keith Noh, vice president head of the ZERO1NE Group at Hyundai Motor Group, said in a statement. “We believe novel materials offer an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate progress towards a better, cleaner, and more efficient future.”
The company is also announcing that Lord John Browne, the former BP CEO who is now chair of the Francis Crick Institute, and Martin van den Brink, the former president and CTO of ASML, which makes the lithography technology for producing advanced semiconductors, are joining its advisory board.
That board already contains two AI “godfathers,” Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-prize-and-Turing Award-winning deep learning pioneer, and his fellow Turing Award-winner Yann LeCun, who is Meta’s chief scientist. It also includes Kristin Persson, a distinguished materials science professor at the University of California Berkeley, who leads the Materials Project, a multinational effort to use machine learning to discover the properties of inorganic materials, and Verity Harding, a former Google DeepMind head of public policy who is now the director of the AI and Geopolitics Project at the University of Cambridge.
