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CuspAI: $450M Series B at $2.6B valuation for AI Materials discovery. Kleiner Perkins and NEA co-led a round that took CuspAI from $520M to $2.6B in ten months, with Jeff Bezos and John Doerr writing personal checks into a startup that wants to replace lab trial-and-error with AI-designed materials. Co-Founder & GP at Six Point Ventures · 3x founder (BrandYourself, Launch.it, SPOT) · 65+ investments · Based in Boca Raton, FL 65+Investments 3xFounder $200M+Funds Tracked Quick Answer CuspAI, a Cambridge, UK-based AI materials discovery startup, raised a $450 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Lux Capital, and AMD Ventures. The round is a roughly 5x markup from the $520 million valuation CuspAI held after its Series A just ten months earlier, in September 2025. CuspAI raised $450 million at a $2.6 billion valuation, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA with Jeff Bezos's family office writing a check alongside John Doerr. That's the short answer. The longer answer is more interesting. A Cambridge, UK company that helps discover new materials - the kind that go into chips, batteries, and industrial coatings - just went from a $520 million valuation to $2.6 billion in ten months, without a product category most people have heard of. This isn't a chatbot, an agent framework, or a coding tool. It's AI applied to one of the slowest, most trial-and-error-heavy fields in industrial science, and the capital markets just priced it like the next foundation model company. CuspAI $450M Series B: round terms and lead investors. CuspAI closed a $450 million Series B on July 21, 2026, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA at a $2.6 billion post-money valuation. Bezos Expeditions, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Tru Arrow Partners, StepStone, and Britain's Sovereign AI Venture Fund all participated, alongside angel investor John Doerr. co-led by Kleiner Perkins, NEA Series B raised up from $520M in Sep 2025 New valuation in roughly 10 months Valuation multiple incl. NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, AMD Foundry partners Figures from TechFundingNews, SiliconANGLE, and Pulse2 reporting on CuspAI's Series B announcement, July 21, 2026. What CuspAI actually builds. CuspAI's pitch is that materials science still runs on a discovery process that hasn't fundamentally changed in decades: a researcher hypothesizes a compound, synthesizes it, tests it, and iterates - often across years and thousands of failed candidates - before landing on something that works. CuspAI's models simulate the mechanical, thermal, and electronic properties of candidate materials computationally first, narrowing an enormous search space down to the handful of candidates actually worth synthesizing in a lab. The commercial product is called the AI Materials Foundry, and CuspAI says it now has more than 45 partners feeding real-world problems and validation data into the platform, including NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and Lam Research. That partner list is the tell: this is squarely aimed at the semiconductor and advanced-manufacturing supply chain, where a single better dielectric, coating, or thermal interface material can be worth billions in yield and performance gains across an entire fab. From $520M to $2.6B in ten months. CuspAI's funding history is a clean case study in how fast AI-for-science valuations are compounding right now. The company raised a $30 million seed in June 2024, then a Series A of just over $100 million in September 2025 - co-led by NEA and Temasek, with NVIDIA's NVentures and Samsung Ventures both already in the cap table - that valued the company at $520 million. Ten months later, the Series B put a $2.6 billion price tag on the same business. Total capital raised across all three rounds is now roughly $580 million. That's a company that's raised more money in the last ten months than most Series C SaaS companies raise across an entire lifecycle, backing a product category - AI-designed materials - that barely existed as a venture thesis three years ago. Why Bezos and Kleiner Perkins are both in this deal. Jeff Bezos's family office, Bezos Expeditions, has been on an aggressive run backing physical-world AI companies through 2026 - it co-led Prometheus's $12 billion round at a $41 billion valuation and put capital into Flourish's $500 million round earlier this year. CuspAI fits the same thesis: AI applied to atoms, not just tokens, in categories with genuine physical-world moats rather than a thin wrapper around a foundation model API. For Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr specifically, materials discovery is also a chip-supply-chain bet. As the AI buildout runs into physical bottlenecks - advanced packaging, thermal management, next-generation dielectrics - the firms funding the compute layer have obvious reasons to also fund the materials layer that determines how fast that compute layer can actually scale. CuspAI vs. the AI-for-science funding wave, side by side. CuspAI isn't raising in a vacuum. It's part of a broader wave of large, fast rounds for AI applied to physical science and hard infrastructure that's defined mid-2026 dealmaking. | Company | Round | Valuation | Focus | | CuspAI | $450M Series B | $2.6B | AI materials discovery | | ICEYE | $450M Series F | $10B | Sovereign space intelligence | | Proxima Fusion | $411M | $2.4B | Fusion energy | | Crusoe | $3B round | $30B | AI data centers | | Humanoid | $152M Series A | $1.35B | Industrial humanoid robots | Figures from TechFundingNews, Forbes, and company announcements as of July 22, 2026. Is a $2.6B valuation justified, or is this multiple expansion again? CuspAI doesn't disclose revenue, and a company this early rarely has ARR that comes close to justifying a $2.6 billion price tag on fundamentals alone. What it does have is a partner list that reads like a who's-who of chipmaking and advanced manufacturing, and a lead investor bench - Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Bezos Expeditions, AMD Ventures - that's betting the partnerships convert into paid enterprise contracts faster than the typical deep-tech company. That's the same dynamic Valueaddvc has tracked across the broader AI market all year: valuations are increasingly priced on distribution and strategic partnerships rather than trailing revenue, which is exactly the multiple expansion dynamic now showing up in categories well outside large language models. Materials science AI is a genuinely hard, capital-intensive problem with real physical-world validation cycles - but a 5x markup in ten months means the market is pricing in a lot of future contract conversion that hasn't happened yet. Bottom line: CuspAI's $450 million Series B at a $2.6 billion valuation is less a story about one Cambridge startup and more a signal about where large-check AI capital is flowing next - out of pure LLM plays and into AI applied to physical-world bottlenecks like materials, energy, and manufacturing. A 45-plus partner list including NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, and three of the biggest names in chip fabrication gives the round real strategic logic. Whether the $2.6 billion price holds depends on how many of those partnerships turn into paying, recurring enterprise contracts before the next markup comes due. Get VC data most people never see - free. Weekly benchmarks, valuations, and fund data. No spam, unsubscribe anytime. Frequently asked questions. How much did CuspAI raise in its Series B? What is CuspAI's valuation after the Series B? What does CuspAI actually do? Who founded CuspAI?

Advanced chipmaking tool arrives at New York state innovation hub. By Max A. Cherney SAN FRANCISCO, July 21 (Reuters) - The first components of an ASML next-generation chipmaking tool arrived at New York state's Albany NanoTech Complex on Tuesday, the governor's office said. The NanoTech complex will use the tool to conduct research and development on future forms of chip design and manufacturing. The NanoTech facility is the only one of its kind in North America, according to NY Creates Director Dave Anderson, and is similar in scope and focus to Europe's Imec, which operates in Belgium. "It really is transformative for the future of our scope of activities as well as U.S.-based R&D, and really, we're kind of at the epicenter of that next generation of technology development," Anderson said. NY Creates oversees the facility and has partnered with IBM, memory maker Micron and the Japanese chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron. ASML's next-generation high numerical aperture (High NA) extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machine prints circuit patterns onto silicon wafers and costs roughly $400 million apiece. The tools are thought to be necessary to produce advanced processors in the future as chipmakers continue to shrink atomic-sized features that make up chips. The components that arrived Tuesday form the base of the mainframe of the tool and will receive further deliveries of the remaining components in the coming weeks as it is assembled at the facility. Anderson expects to have the tool fully functional by the end of the year. (Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)

Tokyo Electron and NVIDIA expand collaboration for Agentic AI and Robotics. As part of the development of Agentic AI and Robotics solutions, Tokyo Electron(TEL; Head Office: Minato-ku, Tokyo; President: Toshiki Kawai) is collaborating with NVIDIA, utilizing NVIDIA Agent Toolkit including NVIDIA NeMo, NVIDIA NIM, NVIDIA NemoClaw blueprints and the open robot development platform NVIDIA Isaac within TEL's "Epsira(TM)" concept for digital transformation (DX) solutions. Using the Isaac platform allows TEL to feed designs into the digital twins integrated with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries for/Simulation; often robotic maintenance must be done on various tool configurations and therefore utilizing a digital twin can allow much faster robot training and accuracy. Regarding AI Agents, NeMo helps TEL accelerate Agent training, tuning and evaluation; NemoClaw allows easier operation and more secure Agent deployment. TEL's Epsira(TM) focuses on enhancing customers' productivity by improving field production efficiency, boosting yields, and increasing equipment availability by reducing both scheduled and unscheduled down time utilizing AI MTBWC (Mean Time Between Wet Cleaning) extension analysis, Robotics maintenance and AI troubleshooting analysis. It is a Digital Transformation infrastructure to deliver enhanced productivity and skill-free operation for its customers through data utilization, thereby minimizing variability and maximizing equipment stability with the vision of having autonomous equipment. It is through this close collaboration TEL continues to strive to contribute to the development of a dream-inspiring society through its leading-edge technologies and reliable service and support. "We are pleased that our collaboration with NVIDIA, a world leader in the AI era, has moved to an even deeper state. This deeper collaboration will allow us to further leverage TEL's Epsira(TM) program to enhance our customers' productivity by enhancing manufacturing utilizing Robotics maintenance and AI troubleshooting analysis" added Keiichi Matsushima, Vice President & General Manager, Corporate Development Division at TEL. "Semiconductor manufacturing is entering a new era of automation, where robotics can help fabs drive greater uptime, precision and resilience across increasingly complex production environments," said Amit Goel, senior director of robotics and edge AI ecosystem at NVIDIA. "TEL is bringing more intelligence to robotic maintenance, AI troubleshooting, and fab operations by leveraging NVIDIA Agentic and Physical AI models and frameworks." For more information about Epsira(TM), please click here. For more information about NVIDIA Isaac and NVIDIA Omniverse, please click hereand here. Epsira is a registered trademark or trademark of Tokyo Electron Group in Japan and/or other countries.