CuspAI has recruited the ‘godfather of AI’ Geoffrey Hinton to its advisory board as the climate tech firm raised $30 million in seed funding.
The Cambridge-based business, which makes algorithms for designing new, more efficient materials in a bid to help tackle climate change, said it hoped to develop materials for use in carbon capture and storage, a critical technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The eight-figure seed funding, an unusually high sum for an early-stage investment round, highlights the huge value investors continue to see in artificial intelligence businesses as well as the UK’s success as a major destination for global AI investment. Securing Hinton to the CuspAI board is likely to be viewed as a major coup for the firm with the 76-year-old having become one of the best-known figures in the field after he dramatically quit Google last year.
London-based Hoxton Ventures led the round alongside funding from Basis Set Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The company was set up by Professor Max Welling, a former VP at Microsoft Research and Qualcomm, and Dr. Chad Edwards, a chemist who has worked in deep-tech at Google and quantum computing firm Quantinuum.
Welling said: “Imagine a search engine not just for existing materials, but for all potential molecules and materials that could be created.
“Our AI can generate and evaluate new materials on demand. For example, you can request a material that selectively binds carbon dioxide under specified conditions – the AI then generates, evaluates and optimises the potential molecular structures that meet those exact criteria.
“Through careful process optimization and lab testing, we’re able to close the loop and ensure materials are synthesizable, stable and ultimately useful in production.”
CuspAI said it had also begun a partnership with social media giant Meta with a view to furthering its open science contributions focused on the discovery of new materials to address climate change.
Yann Le Cun, VP and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, said: “The world needs fast progress on affordable carbon capture, and we believe that CuspAI’s team is in an excellent position to apply AI-based materials discovery to this pressing problem.”
Wimbledon-born Hinton, who won the Turing award in 2018 for his work in deep learning, resigned from Google in May last year, citing a desire to be able to "freely speak out about the risks of A.I."
