Cambridge’s CuspAI raises £338m at a £1.95bn valuation

TL;DR:

  • CuspAI has closed a £338m ($450m) Series B at a £1.95bn ($2.6bn) valuation, roughly five times its September mark of £390m ($520m).
  • The UK’s Sovereign AI Fund invested alongside Bezos Expeditions, in a round co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA.
  • The two-year-old Cambridge company has now raised more than £500m ($670m) in total.

CuspAI builds AI systems that search for new physical materials — a customer specifies the properties they need, such as a semiconductor with particular characteristics or a compound that captures carbon efficiently, and the platform proposes candidates. ASML and Meta are among its customers, and Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton advise the company.

The round’s composition matters as much as its size. Alongside Kleiner Perkins, NEA and Bezos Expeditions sit Glade Brook, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Tru Arrow, StepStone and the UK’s Sovereign AI Fund, with existing backers Temasek, Basis Set, Giant Ventures, Phoenix Court and Northzone following on.

A small cheque with a large signal

The Sovereign AI Fund writes cheques of £5m to £10m, so its participation is financially marginal in a £338m round. Its significance is directional: the fund launched this year to back domestic AI companies, and CuspAI is precisely the profile it was created for — Cambridge-founded, deep-technical, commercially contracted to global manufacturers. That the fund appears on the cap table beside Bezos rather than in place of him is arguably the point.

The raise also lands in an awkward week for the policy machinery behind it. The Sovereign AI Fund sat within DSIT — the department Andy Burnham has now abolished, dispersing its functions across Whitehall a day after this round was announced.

Looking forward

Proceeds go towards expansion across the US, APAC and Europe, and towards an “AI Materials Foundry” — a network of data, labs, compute and expertise whose founding partners include Nvidia, Meta, Samsung and Hyundai, plus more than 40 other companies. Kleiner Perkins chairman John Doerr framed materials discovery as “quietly a bottleneck behind progress in energy, semiconductors, and climate”.

For UK readers the useful comparison is scale: at £1.95bn after two years, CuspAI is now among the more valuable private AI companies founded in Britain, and it got there selling to industry rather than to consumers.

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