- Discovered Materials, a startup founded by two IIT Madras alumni, has raised $9 million (about ₹75 crore) in seed funding led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, and angel investors.
- The company unveiled hundreds of AI-discovered materials and introduced Material Discovery Bench, which it describes as the first benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on real-world semiconductor materials-discovery problems.
- The funding will be used to expand the team and lab, and scale the company's AI research agents.
- Co-founders Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas met over a decade ago as students at IIT Madras, one of India's premier engineering institutions.
- Sridhar has a PhD in Materials Science from Stanford University and has spent the last 11 years researching new materials for semiconductor chips.
- Ramdas studied AI at Carnegie Mellon and was a research engineer building video models and agents at Persona AI and Luma Labs.
Discovered Materials, founded by IIT Madras alumni Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, has raised $9 million in seed funding to enhance the discovery of materials for semiconductor chips. The funding round, led by Lightspeed India Partners, also included contributions from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners.124567
The company aims to accelerate material discovery to meet the unprecedented demand for advanced computing driven by AI technologies. According to co-founder Akash Ramdas, “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.”
The funding will be utilized to expand the team and lab, and to scale the company’s AI research agents. The startup has already unveiled hundreds of AI-discovered materials and a benchmark called Material Discovery Bench, designed to evaluate AI agents on real-world semiconductor materials-discovery problems.3
Sridhar, who holds a PhD in Materials Science from Stanford, has spent over a decade researching new materials for semiconductors. Ramdas, with a background in AI from Carnegie Mellon, has experience in building video models and agents. Hemant Mohapatra, a partner at Lightspeed, expressed excitement about the partnership, stating, “We’re excited to partner with Discovered Materials as they build the future of semiconductor innovation.”
The startup's AI agents facilitate faster identification of promising materials through simulation, synthesis, and experimental validation, significantly outpacing traditional R&D methods.
“The company also unveiled hundreds of AI-discovered materials and Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark for evaluating AI agents on real-world semiconductor problems. Co-founder Akash Ramdas said new thermal materials match performance of products that took the world's largest chemical companies years to develop.”
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