CuspAI, a company based in Cambridge, United Kingdom, was able to secure $30 million.
The mentioned funds were received by the firm following the results of the seed round of financing, which was led by Hoxton Ventures. Also involved in this process were Basis Set Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, LocalGlobe, Northzone, Touring Capital, Giant Ventures, FJ Labs, Tiferes Ventures, Zero Prime Ventures and others.
CuspAI is in a sense an advanced company, as it strives in a practical plane to realize the potential prospects and consequences of the so far largely theoretical probability that software controlled by generative artificial intelligence will be used to design new materials. It is worth noting that the modern standard methodology for the implementation of the mentioned process provides that new material is being made initially, and then the computer determines whether it came out correctly.
Co-founder and CEO of CuspAI Chad Edwards says that this firm is flipping the old algorithm for designing new materials on its head. In his opinion, if someone can add materials or molecules and get a property, then someone can add properties and get molecules and materials. Currently, the market for such solutions is dominated by such players as Schrodinger and Dassault Systems. The mentioned companies provide consumers with software tools for chemical calculations and simulations of materials.
Orbital Materialsm, part of Google’s Deepmind team, has developed an artificial intelligence-based platform. This platform can be used to discover a variety of materials, including batteries and carbon dioxide-capturing cells. Orbital Materialsm raised a $16 million investment in a Series A funding round.
Chad Edwards says that just as search engines enabled the Internet, a world is currently being formed in which people will be able to explore a very large space of new materials and molecules to discover new materials with precisely the specific necessary properties. In his opinion, human civilization is entering the era of materials on demand.
CuspAI claims that its platform functions as a search engine for materials, allowing users to quickly evaluate the vast number of novel structures. Chad Edwards says that civilization has always defined itself based on the materials of a specific time, mentioning the Bronze Age and the Stone Age in this context.
CuspAI started its activities this year. The co-founder of the company is Max Welling, a professor and renowned pioneer in the area of artificial intelligence. He was a Distinguished Scientist and VP at Microsoft Research and Qualcomm, and a professor at the University of Amsterdam. According to him, the artificial intelligence technology used by CuspAI can generate and evaluate new materials on demand. He noted that the consumer, for example, can request a material that selectively binds carbon dioxide under certain conditions. After that, artificial intelligence will begin to generate, evaluate, and optimize potential molecular structures that meet exactly the mentioned criteria.
Chad Edwards is a chemist who has been involved in the commercialization of deep technologies at Google and BASF, and most recently quantum computing leader, Quantinuum.
Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, will also serve as a board advisor to the company. The expert says that shortly human civilization will face certain problems, some of which will be related to artificial intelligence, but at the same time AI will become a way to solve several other difficulties and challenges. Geoffrey Hinton was impressed by CuspAI and its mission to accelerate the process of developing new materials using digital intelligence to solve the problem of climate change, which is one of the most important currently.
The company assumes that in the short term, materials designed by applying artificial intelligence can have a significant impact on the processes associated with carbon capture and storage. Chad Edwards stated that the firm is looking at the design of molecular sponges that selectively absorb carbon dioxide from the air.
CuspAI is also collaborating with Meta as part of the open science project to find new materials to address climate change.
As we have reported earlier, Black Semiconductor Raises $273 Million.
