AI startup Discovered Materials plans to use artificial intelligence agents to find new materials that can be used to build more efficient integrated circuits. Currently, chips running AI workloads are really hot, creating a need for data centers to use more electricity and require cooling systems, and this startup aims to find a solution for that.
Discovered Materials said it recently closed a $9 million seed round from Lightspeed India Partners after emerging from Y Combinator, with investment from Peak XV Partners and angel investors Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar.
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The new funds will be used to expand the team and laboratory and scale its AI research agents, the startup said in a press release.
Discovered Materials, which was founded by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, operates cloud-based autonomous AI agents that run thousands of virtual material hypotheses daily using custom model harnesses incorporating frontier AI models. The AI-generated material candidates are then evaluated through physics simulations to assess their stability, dielectric constants and thermal properties.
The co-founders drew on Ramdas’ experience earning a doctorate in materials science from Stanford, and Sridhar’s work on agents at Persona AI and Luma Labs.
“[Ramdas] was doing maybe 20 guesses a day during his PhD,” Sridhar told TechCrunch. “We’re able to do thousands of guesses a day now by having these agents run 24/7 on the cloud, exploring research directions that he gives them.”
Discovered Materials has also launched the Material Discovery Bench to evaluate how frontier AI systems perform on real-world semiconductor material challenges. The startup also plans to patent promising material candidates and license the resulting thermal management and semiconductor technologies to global chipmakers.
Other companies MatNex, SandboxAQ, and CuspAI have launched similar systems. Discovered Materials however stands out for its focus on the thermal problems of semiconductor materials. The company said it has already discovered several materials that match the properties of existing materials used by major chipmakers, but can’t share more details about them.
One challenge comes from the fact that If the startup finds a material that might reduce heat generation or improve dissipation, it might be too difficult to actually manufacture a chip out of it, or its electrical properties are compromised.
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“It’s a bit of playing whack-a-mole with atomic structures,” Hemant Mohapatra, the Lightspeed partner who led this round, told TechCrunch. “A material is only useful in the real world if all of them converge at once, which is what makes this a really interesting search problem.”
Mohapatra expects that the business of predicting novel substances will be commoditized as models continue to improve.
Sridhar says that when they find valuable candidates, the company will attempt to patent the use of the materials in GPUs, or the process by which chips can be made out of the substance, licensing them out to chipmakers. He hopes that they will have new materials worth patenting in the next year.