CuspAI, a UK startup that aims to help engineer sustainable materials, has raised $30 million from venture funds in Europe and the U.S., secured a partnership with Meta’s FAIR unit, and employed the advisory services of AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton in its mission to tackle climate change. “CuspAI leverages cutting-edge generative AI, deep learning, and molecular simulation to streamline the material design process,” the company announced. Its platform “functions like a search engine for materials, allowing users to request specific properties for new materials on demand,” speeding the process of “the discovery of materials with precise functionalities.”

CuspAI joins an emerging, but actively growing field. “The market is dominated by players such as Schrodinger and Dassault Systemes, both of which provide software tools to perform computational chemistry and material simulations,” according to TechCrunch.

Another new player, Orbital Materials, recruited from the Google DeepMind team to launch a GenAI-powered platform that includes materials discovery capabilities, recently raised $16 million in a Series A.

“We think we’re entering the ‘materials-on-demand’ era,” CuspAI co-founder and CEO Chad Edwards told TechCrunch, explaining that “in the same way that search engines enabled the Internet, we believe we’re on the cusp of a world in which you can search the very, very large space of new materials and molecules to discover new materials that have exactly the desired properties.”

One area in which the team believes AI-designed materials can have a positive near-term impact is carbon capture and storage, “a critical technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and an industry expected to be worth $4 trillion by 2050,” CuspAI explains in an announcement.

CuspAI also sees opportunity in semiconductor manufacturing, the green hydrogen sector and creating synthetic fuels, reports Bloomberg, writing that “the company is developing proprietary databases for its own AI, partially via a partnership with Meta Platforms,” which is also providing computing resources.

TechCrunch describes Edwards as “a chemist who has been involved in deep tech commercialization at Google and BASF and most recently at quantum computing leader, Quantinuum,” adding that CuspAI leadership includes co-founder Max Welling, “formerly the distinguished scientist and VP at Microsoft Research and Qualcomm.”

“Hinton, a computer scientist who is often called one of the ‘godfathers of AI,’ has been selective in who he advises since he left Alphabet Inc.’s Google last year,” Bloomberg reports, adding that “while chatbots are the face of the generative AI boom, scientific labs are also tapping the emerging technology.”