Our investment in CuspAI

We are proud to continue investing in CuspAI through Latitude as they announce a $100m+ funding round led by Temasek and NEA. Having supported Cusp from its seed stage via LocalGlobe, we are excited to continue backing their extraordinary journey through Latitude.

I focus my time on finding and working with the most ambitious founders solving the hardest problems with original technology and science that can scale globally. In other words, those building the future we are all going to live in.

CuspAI is changing the slow, trial-and-error process of discovering new materials. Their AI-driven platform creates a systematic engine for innovation, enabling the rapid design of breakthrough materials in sectors like separations chemistry, energy, and semiconductors, areas with enormous potential for both economic and societal value. What took decades can now be achieved in months, marking a major leap forward for science and industry.

We’ve had the privilege to get to know Dr Chad Edwards and Prof Max Welling, thanks to our friend Mehdi Ghissassi, and their progress over the past 12 months has been remarkable.

Chad’s background includes a Master’s in Chemistry, a PhD in Nuclear Fission and Quantum Chemistry, and an MBA. He started as a Research Scientist and BP Scholar. Before Cusp, he was the commercial co-founder of Cambridge Quantum Computing, growing it from 15 to 550 employees, and merging with Honeywell to form Quantinuum. Coming from a small Welsh village, Chad was the first in his family to attend university, all on scholarship, showcasing his grit and excellence. His vision was clear: he wanted to build a company harnessing AI’s power for materials science, and he cultivated a strong relationship with Max Welling until they launched Cusp together.

Prof. Max Welling, co-founder and CTO is a globally recognized machine learning expert and one of the world’s most cited with an H-index of 116, and his work under Nobel Laureate Gerard ’t Hooft and Prof. Geoffrey Hinton underscores his pioneering role. Max is a second time Founder, he exited his first company, Scyfer, to Qualcomm, and held senior positions there as well as at Microsoft Research, and is widely regarded as a pioneer in the application of ML to physical sciences.

Together, Chad and Max have assembled an outstanding team: 22 PhDs from top institutions, with deep expertise in AI, chemistry, and engineering as well as scaling and successfully exiting tech companies; many from Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Microsoft, and Dassault.

In addition, they have an incredible roster of world class advisors: Prof. Yann LeCun (Meta’s Chief AI Scientist), Prof. Kristin Persson (UC Berkeley/Materials Project) and Verity Harding (AI policy expert) as well as Nobel Laureate Prof. Geoffrey Hinton, Lord John Browne (ex-CEO of BP), Martin van den Brink (ex-CTO and Chairman of ASML).

CuspAI is making rapid progress in pursuit of its vision:

• The CuspAI Search Engine is now generating and testing new materials daily.
• Their Foundation Model predicts properties precisely and speeds up the search process and is backed by proprietary datasets
• Their Generative Models are designing entirely new materials optimized for specific performance needs.
• They’ve established strategic partnerships with top labs worldwide and are collaborating with industry partners including Hyundai, Finnish water company Kemira, and Meta

CuspAI is tackling multiple trillion-dollar markets, including: separation technologies (developing materials for large-scale carbon capture, water purification — removing PFAS — and hydrogen storage), energy systems and semiconductors.

We believe CuspAI is now positioned to become a leader in AI-powered materials discovery. Their proprietary IP, strategic partnerships, and talented team position them for extraordinary growth and long-term impact and we’re excited to support CuspAI as they accelerate innovation, address global challenges, and reshape the future of materials science.

In this round, proud to also invest alongside NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Samsung, Hyundai, as well as our friends at Giant Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, FJ Labs, Giant Ventures, Northzone, and Prosus, as well as angels including Durk Kingma (OpenAI Co-Founder), Zoubin Ghahramani (Google DeepMind VP Research), Arash Ferdowsi (Co-Founder of Dropbox), Thomas Wolf (Co-Founder of Hugging Face) and Victor Riparbelli (Co-Founder and CEO of Synthesia)