Discovered Materials, a startup building AI agents that discover new materials for semiconductor chips, has announced a $9 million seed round led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners, plus angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar. The funding will accelerate the company's mission to make materials discovery fast enough to keep pace with AI's exploding demand for higher-performance compute.
Co-founders Advaith Sridhar (AI/video models researcher from CMU and Luma Labs) and Akash Ramdas (PhD in Material Science from Stanford, 11 years researching nanoscale interconnects) met over a decade ago at IIT-Madras. Ramdas' work on new nanoscale interconnects was Stanford Engineering's most popular story in 2025. The seed funding will expand the team and lab capacity to scale the company's agentic research pipeline.
Discovered Materials also released hundreds of new materials discovered by frontier AI models and announced Material Discovery Bench, the first benchmark for agentic materials discovery on real-world semiconductor problems. The timing is critical: as AI chip demand grows exponentially, the traditional multi-year timeline for materials R&D has become a bottleneck. Using AI agents to compress this cycle positions the company to help chipmakers meet the performance demands of next-generation AI infrastructure.