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Turning a virtually designed new material into a physical product is the hardest challenge facing CuspAI, CEO Chad Edwards tells Axios Pro.

Driving the news: Cambridge-based CuspAI announced a $450 million funding round at a $2.6 billion valuation Monday, which included financing from Jeff Bezos and the U.K. government's sovereign AI fund.

How it works: Edwards says the company has developed "synthesis-aware generative models" that take into account the constraints of the customers' lab when developing a material.

A lab has a much higher probability of being able to make the material if the manufacturing process has been built into the knowledge of the generative models, says Edwards.

Edwards chatted with Axios Pro on CuspAI's plans in various sectors:

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

On the foundry: "The foundry concept brings together the data providers, the experimental houses and lab facilities, the compute, the AI platform from Cusp and the customers into a very kind of concerted commercial effort.

So we run discovery programs with our commercial partners. They bring the specifications, and then we help them to discover new materials."

On the chip sector: "I think it's around 60% to 70% of the foundry members are in the semiconductor or semi-adjacent space to have a relevance to semiconductors. We see that as by far the biggest and nearest commercial opportunity for the work that we're doing.

The whole semi industry is a material science problem, and so if we can design new materials across that process, then it allows those to move much faster."

On the business model: "The business model is kind of parallel to the business model in drug discovery. We have programs that we form with our customers. They pay us up front for the initial programs that we run, and then there's a royalty at the end on the material that we generate."

On first commercialization: "We're only a 2-year-old company. We have promising programs in the pipeline, but nothing has yet made its way into a chip or an EV.

We hope that will happen in a fairly short period of time."

On the climate angle: "In every project that we take on, we have an ethics framework, and we like to make sure that we can measure some kind of positive impact from every project.

In some cases, we have customers requesting to do programs where the net impact is not positive on the climate. You can imagine some of those in the energy space.

So we actually don't take on those projects altogether. It's a really core part of our culture and our DNA as a company."

CuspAI CEO on the biggest challenge for making new materials

The British startup closed $450m at a $2.6b valuation

Smiling man with blond hair and light beard stands outside a modern glass building, wearing a white shirt and dark jacket, with greenery visible in the background.

CuspAI co-founder and CEO Chad Edwards. Photo: Courtesy CuspAI

Turning a virtually designed new material into a physical product is the hardest challenge facing CuspAI, CEO Chad Edwards tells Axios Pro.Driving the news: Cambridge-based CuspAI <a class="gtmContentClick" data-vars-link-text="announced" data-vars-click-url="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/20/jeff-bezos-uk-government-invest-in-2bn-british-startup-cuspai" data-vars-content-id="2ea3da6e-e17b-4621-af08-35a34f6cce00" data-vars-headline="CuspAI CEO on the biggest challenge for making new materials" data-vars-event-category="story" data-vars-sub-category="story" data-vars-item="in_content_link" href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/20/jeff-bezos-uk-government-invest-in-2bn-british-startup-cuspai" target="_blank">announced</a> a $450 million funding round at a $2.6 billion valuation Monday, which included financing from Jeff Bezos and the U.K. government&#x27;s sovereign AI fund.

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CuspAI CEO on the biggest challenge for making new materials

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