US startup Discovered Materials closes $9 million seed round

Discovered Materials, a San Francisco, California-based startup building AI agents that discover and accelerate the adoption of new materials for semiconductor chips, has announced a USD 9 million seed round, according to a media release.

The round was led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners, and angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar. The funding is expected to advance the company’s aim to make new materials discovery to keep pace with AI’s demand for compute.

“AI is creating unprecedented demand for better chips, but progress is increasingly constrained by how slowly new materials reach production,” said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India Venture Partners. “We're excited to partner with Discovered Materials as they build the future of semiconductor innovation, starting with a very urgent wedge on better heat dissipation from increasingly hotter chips.”

Discovered Materials builds AI agents that compress months of interdisciplinary research into days, spanning simulation, synthesis and experimental validation.

To study the rapid progress of these AI agents and measure their ability, the company released hundreds of new materials discovered by frontier AI models for semiconductor applications, the media release said.

“Advances in compute have driven most of technological progress over the last 50 years, but chips today are at least 10,000x less power-efficient than the human brain,” said Akash Ramdas, co-founder of Discovered Materials. “New materials are how we close that gap — in the last 3 months, we have made new thermal materials that match the performance of products that the world’s largest chemical companies took years to develop.”