Cambridge-based CuspAI has closed a $450 million Series B funding round at a valuation of $2.6 billion, cementing its position as one of the most heavily backed AI startups in Europe. The round represents a five-fold increase from the company's $520 million valuation just ten months ago, when it raised $100 million in September 2025. In total, the two-year-old startup has now raised more than $670 million.

Who's Backing It

The round was co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, two of Silicon Valley's most established venture firms, with significant participation from Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos's family office.

New institutional investors include:

  • Glade Brook Capital Partners
  • Lux Capital
  • AMDVentures
  • Tru Arrow Partners
  • StepStone
  • UK Sovereign AI Fund — the UK government-backed vehicle that invests between £5 million and £10 million in domestic AI startups, which publicly launched earlier this year

Existing investors Temasek, Basis Set Ventures, Giant Ventures, Phoenix Court, and Northzone also participated in the round.

What CuspAI Actually Does

CuspAI is building AI systems to discover and design new physical materials — think semiconductors, carbon capture agents, water treatment compounds, and clean energy components. It functions as a kind of intelligent search engine for material properties: customers specify what they need a material to do, and CuspAI's platform surfaces or designs candidates that fit.

Its customer list already includes ASML and Meta, spanning both the semiconductor and technology industries. The company's scientific advisory board includes Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, two of the most prominent names in modern AI research.

"Materials discovery has quietly been a bottleneck behind progress in energy, semiconductors, and climate. What's remarkable about Cusp is that a single platform is already solving hard problems across industries — from stripping forever chemicals from drinking water to designing next-generation chip materials." — John Doerr, Chairman, Kleiner Perkins

The AI Materials Foundry

A significant portion of the funding will go toward CuspAI's new AI Materials Foundry — described as a global network of data, laboratories, compute infrastructure, and scientific expertise oriented around materials design.

Founding partners of the Foundry include:

  • Nvidia
  • Meta
  • Samsung
  • Hyundai
  • More than 40 additional companies

The initiative is aimed at helping researchers develop new materials faster and more cheaply than conventional lab-based approaches allow. CuspAI will also use the capital to expand its presence across the US, APAC, and Europe.

Why This Matters

For founders and investors watching the AI landscape, CuspAI's trajectory illustrates how quickly valuations are moving for startups that apply AI to deep scientific problems with clear industrial demand — materials science, drug discovery, protein folding. The five-fold valuation jump in under a year is striking even by current standards.

The involvement of the UK Sovereign AI Fund is also notable context. It signals that the UK government is moving from rhetoric about backing domestic AI to actually writing checks alongside top-tier US venture capital. For UK-based AI founders, that co-investment dynamic — government-backed capital validating a round alongside Kleiner Perkins and Bezos — is a meaningful structural development worth tracking.