Sovereign AI invests in CuspAI to reinvent how the world discovers new materials

Every major technological leap has been enabled by breakthroughs in materials. 

From silicon chips that now power the digital economy to lithium-ion batteries that underpin the energy transition, the materials we discover define the technologies we can build.

However, discovering new materials remains one of science's slowest and most resource-intensive processes, often taking years or even decades of experimentation.

Today, we're excited to announce that Sovereign AI has invested in CuspAI as part of its $450 million Series B financing.

Founded and headquartered in Cambridge, CuspAI is building frontier AI models to fundamentally transform how new materials are discovered and designed. Rather than relying on traditional trial-and-error experimentation, the company is creating an AI-powered search engine capable of designing entirely new materials with specific properties on demand.

If successful, the implications are profound. Faster materials discovery could unlock breakthroughs across virtually every major industrial and scientific challenge of our time, including:

• Better batteries and energy storage. 
• More powerful semiconductors and computing hardware. 
• Materials that enable the removal of PFAS "forever chemicals" from water. 
• Carbon capture and climate technologies. 
• Advanced manufacturing and next-generation industrial materials. 

The ability to discover and engineer entirely new materials at speed has the potential to compress decades of scientific progress into years. It could fundamentally reshape how innovation happens across chemistry, manufacturing, energy and medicine, creating capabilities that simply aren't possible today.

This is exactly the kind of frontier ambition Sovereign AI is backing. We believe the UK can produce globally significant AI companies tackling problems of extraordinary scientific and economic importance, and CuspAI exemplifies that opportunity: world-leading science, exceptional founders and the potential to create technology with lasting global impact.

Josephine Kant, Head of Ventures at Sovereign AI:

“What I love about CuspAI is the sheer scale of the idea: a search engine for materials that don’t exist yet. Chad and Max have assembled a world-class team with the scientific brilliance and commercial experience to actually turn it into reality. Our job at Sovereign AI is to ensure companies like CuspAI can scale from here, not despite being in the UK, but because of it."

CuspAI's Series B will accelerate development of its AI platform, expand its research capabilities and help bring its technology into industrial applications at scale.

We're delighted to partner with Chad, Max and the entire CuspAI team on the next stage of their journey.

Dr Chad Edwards, Co-founder & CEO

Dr Chad Edwards is a British chemist and entrepreneur from South Wales with a track record of building category-defining deep technology companies.

Before founding CuspAI, Chad was the commercial leader at Cambridge Quantum, where he helped scale the company from 14 to more than 550 employees before its merger with Honeywell Quantum Solutions to create Quantinuum, now one of the world's leading quantum computing companies. Earlier in his career, he worked at Google Quantum AI and BASF.

Now aged 35, Chad has built two unicorn companies. His experience spans quantum computing, chemistry, AI and company building, with a focus on translating frontier scientific research into globally impactful commercial businesses.

At CuspAI, he is applying that experience to one of science's biggest bottlenecks: dramatically accelerating the discovery of novel materials using foundation AI models.

Professor Max Welling, Co-founder & CTO

Professor Max Welling is one of the world's leading machine learning researchers and a pioneer in probabilistic AI.

He is Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam and Co-founder and CTO of CuspAI. Previously, he was Partner and VP at Microsoft Research, where he helped lead research applying AI to scientific discovery. He is also a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of CIFAR and ELLIS.

Over the past two decades, Max has made foundational contributions across deep learning, probabilistic modelling and generative AI, including co-inventing Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), one of the landmark advances in modern generative AI. His research has helped shape the field of machine learning and has been recognised internationally through numerous honours, including the Dutch AI Award, ICML and ICLR Test of Time Awards, and the ECCV Koenderink Prize.

At CuspAI, Max brings world-leading expertise in foundation models and scientific AI to build a new generation of AI systems capable of reasoning about chemistry and materials at unprecedented scale.