Discovered Materials Closes $9M Seed Round to Accelerate the Adoption of New Materials for Semiconductor Chips

Funding round led by Lightspeed will scale the company's AI agents, compressing years of materials R&D and shrinking the lab-to-fab timeline

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Discovered Materials, a company building AI agents that discover and accelerate the adoption of new materials for semiconductor chips, announces a $9M seed round. They also released hundreds of new materials discovered by frontier AI models, along with Material Discovery Bench - the first benchmark for agentic materials discovery on real-world semiconductor chip problems.

The round is 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 will accelerate the company’s mission: making new materials discovery fast enough 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. 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," 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.”

AI chips have a heat problem. GPUs today handle heat fluxes of roughly 140 W/cm² - hotter than a space shuttle nose cone re-entering Earth's atmosphere, and the problem is getting worse. This heat is why datacenters consume so much power and water. New materials can attack the problem from both sides, reducing heat generated by enabling 3D stacking, and dissipating heat faster once it's produced. But today, moving a new material from a science experiment to an industrial fab takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars - the industry's infamous "valley of death." 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 today released hundreds of new materials discovered by frontier AI models for semiconductor applications. Alongside this, they released Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark built with experts from industry and academia that tracks frontier model performance for this problem. The company will continue to build the graders that test AI-discovered materials in both simulation and experiment.

"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."

Co-founders Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas met over a decade ago at IIT-Madras. Akash has a PhD in Material Science from Stanford University, and has spent the last 11 years researching new materials for semiconductor chips. His work on new nanoscale interconnects was Stanford Engineering’s most popular story of 2025. Advaith studied AI at Carnegie Mellon and was a research engineer building video models and agents at Persona AI (acquired) and Luma Labs. The seed funding will be used to expand the team, the lab and scale the company's AI research agents.

About Discovered Materials

Discovered Materials builds AI agents that discover and accelerate the adoption of new materials for semiconductor chips. Our mission is to make chips as performant as the human brain. Learn more at discoveredmaterials.com.