CuspAI

Cambridge company using AI to discover new materials for semiconductors, energy and the climate, working with industry and research partners.

About CuspAI

CuspAI uses AI to discover new materials. Almost everything around us, from the chips in a computer to the membranes that clean water and the batteries in a car, depends on the properties of a material. Finding a better material normally takes years of lab experiments. CuspAI builds AI models that can search through huge numbers of possible chemicals and predict which ones are worth making, so scientists can reach useful discoveries much faster.

The company is based in Cambridge, where it has its registered office on Station Road. It was founded in 2024 and, according to Wikipedia, one of its co-founders is Max Welling, a machine learning professor at the University of Amsterdam who is its chief technology officer. He is well known in AI research, including for work on a technique called variational autoencoders. The pages we read do not name the other co-founders.

CuspAI describes its goal as unlocking breakthrough materials for semiconductors, energy and the climate. Its slogan is that it aims to deliver trillion-dollar materials breakthroughs in months, not millennia. Wikipedia describes its work as building AI that finds chemicals and materials to help address climate change and improve sustainability.

The centre of its work is the AI Materials Foundry, a network that combines AI computing, chemistry expertise, experiments in real labs and scientific data. The company names NVIDIA and Meta as core partners, along with industry partners such as 3M, AMD, Applied Materials, Fujifilm, Hyundai, Merck and Tokyo Electron, and lab partners including imec and the University of Cambridge. The challenges it targets include coatings and films, membranes and sorbents (for example for separating gases), catalysts, semiconductor materials, and energy storage and battery materials.

CuspAI is a young company that mixes machine learning with chemistry, physics and materials science, so it needs both coders and scientists. Its website links to a jobs board, and the pages we read do not describe internships or graduate schemes, so students should check current openings.

What they do

• {'desc': 'A network combining AI, chemistry, labs and data to discover materials.', 'title': 'AI Materials Foundry'}
• {'desc': 'Searching for new materials for chip manufacturing.', 'title': 'Materials for semiconductors'}
• {'desc': 'Looking for materials to store and use energy more efficiently.', 'title': 'Energy and battery materials'}
• {'desc': 'Membranes, sorbents and catalysts for chemical processes.', 'title': 'Separations and catalysis'}

Key facts

• Founded: 2024
• Based in: Cambridge, UK
• Co-founder and CTO: Max Welling (per Wikipedia)
• Core partners include NVIDIA and Meta
• Aims to find new materials for semiconductors, energy and climate

Website: www.cusp.ai