Discovered Materials has raised $9 million in seed funding to expand its use of AI agents for discovering and accelerating the adoption of new materials used in semiconductor chips. The round was led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners. Angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar also participated.
Discovered Materials is developing AI agents designed to compress semiconductor materials research timelines by combining simulation, synthesis and experimental validation.
The company is initially focusing on one of the semiconductor industry’s increasingly important challenges: heat generated by high-performance AI chips.
Discovered Materials said GPUs can currently experience heat fluxes of roughly 140 watts per square centimeter. The company believes new materials could help address the issue by enabling denser 3D chip stacking while improving heat dissipation after it is generated.
Bringing a new semiconductor material from scientific research into an industrial fabrication facility can traditionally take years and require hundreds of millions of dollars. Discovered Materials is seeking to shorten that development cycle by using AI agents to conduct interdisciplinary research that would otherwise take months.
Alongside the financing, the company released hundreds of new materials discovered by frontier AI models for semiconductor applications.
Discovered Materials also introduced Material Discovery Bench, which it describes as the first benchmark for agentic materials discovery focused on real-world semiconductor problems. The benchmark was developed with experts from industry and academia and is designed to track the performance of frontier models.
The company plans to continue developing evaluation systems that test AI-discovered materials through both simulation and physical experiments.
Discovered Materials said that over the past three months, it has developed new thermal materials that match the performance of products that major chemical companies took years to develop.
The company was co-founded by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, who met more than a decade ago at IIT Madras.
Ramdas holds a Ph.D. in materials science from Stanford University and has spent approximately 11 years researching semiconductor materials. Sridhar studied AI at Carnegie Mellon and previously worked on video models and AI agents at Persona AI and Luma Labs.
Discovered Materials plans to use the seed financing to expand its team and laboratory operations while scaling its AI research agents.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is creating unprecedented demand for better chips, but progress is increasingly constrained by how slowly new materials reach production. Akash and Advaith bring together a rare combination of deep materials science expertise and frontier AI engineering, enabling them to compress years of materials R&D into days.”
Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India Venture Partners
“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.”
“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.”
Akash Ramdas, Co-Founder of Discovered Materials
