Chad Edwards

Chad Edwards is co-founder and chief executive of CuspAI, which he founded with Max Welling in Cambridge in 2024. The company was incorporated in March 2024 and builds AI systems that propose new materials and help researchers work out how to make them, for uses from semiconductors and energy storage to water filtration and capturing carbon dioxide from the air.

Fortune described CuspAI’s approach as “a search engine for the material world”: generative models that design candidate molecules and materials while taking account of whether they can be synthesized.

Two rounds in 10 months

In September 2025 CuspAI raised a $100m (£75m) Series A led by New Enterprise Associates and Temasek, at a $520m valuation, when it had about 30 staff, according to Fortune. In July 2026 it raised a $450m Series B at a $2.6bn valuation, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA. Other investors include Bezos Expeditions, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Invest-NL and the UK government’s Sovereign AI fund.

Much of the new money is going into lab operations in Cambridge, Singapore and the San Francisco Bay Area. “As AI transforms the physical world, new materials will open up new frontiers across semiconductors, energy and advanced manufacturing,” Edwards said, as reported by Verdict.

A foundry for materials

Alongside the Series B, CuspAI launched what it calls an AI Materials Foundry, which brings more than 45 organizations onto its platform to pool computing, lab access and scientific expertise. Members include NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Lam Research. The company’s MIRA platform lets partners run a discovery project from generative design and simulation through to planning a synthesis route and testing the result in a lab.

Why it matters to UK buyers

Few UK technology buyers will license a materials-discovery platform directly. The effect is more likely to show up further down the supply chain, in the chips, batteries and data center hardware they buy, if materials designed this way reach production. For UK policy and industry, CuspAI is a Cambridge-headquartered company that has drawn in chipmakers and chip-equipment suppliers from the US, Korea and Japan, with the government’s own AI fund on its register.

Edwards has taken CuspAI from incorporation to a $2.6bn valuation in a little over two years, and turned a research idea into a consortium that includes NVIDIA, Samsung and Lam Research. Whether its materials reach factories is the measure that will count next.