Turning battery waste into industrial metals; OpenAI elevates Uday Ruddarraju to CTO of Compute

Hello,

New-age companies the world over are keen to use AI to solve challenges in the physical world. 

One such company is CuspAI. This British startup has teamed up with Nvidia and other industry leaders to use AI to discover new materials in semiconductors, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. 

CuspAI has secured $450 million in Series B funding to boost efforts in material breakthroughs. Backers include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and the UK government’s sovereign AI fund. 

In other major news from the UK, Andy Burnham takes over as Britain’s Prime Minister, succeeding Keir Starmer. As Burnham promises big changes, he is expected to focus on issues such as cost-of-living, housing and utilities. 

Elsewhere, Shoko Kawata, the mayor of Yawata, a small city in ​Japan, has become the first sitting mayor in the country to take maternity leave. While her decision has grabbed international media attention, it has also drawn criticism at home, throwing light on Japan’s stark gender gap, especially in politics. 

“People talk about gender equality and work-style reform, but we need to build a society in which people, across all professions, including among those in leadership roles, do not hesitate to have children,” said Kawata. 

In other news, how did Paypal lose its way? What led to the once dominant digital payments firm and a Wall Street favourite becoming a takeover target? 

Finally, a recap of some of the action-packed moments from the FIFA World Cup. 

In today’s newsletter, we will talk about 

• Turning battery waste into industrial metals
• OpenAI elevates Uday Ruddarraju to CTO of Compute

Here’s your trivia for today: What was the name of Apple’s short-lived personal digital assistant?

In-focus

Turning battery waste into industrial metals

Metastable Materials believes India’s growing battery waste isn’t really waste. The Bengaluru startup extracts lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and aluminium from spent batteries and sells them as refined commodity metals. 

The startup was founded in October 2021 by IIT Roorkee graduates Shubham Vishvakarma and Manikumar Uppala on a simple idea: those spent batteries are not waste to be processed but are ore to be refined.

How it works: 

• Metastable buys spent lithium-ion batteries, dismantles them, and refines the materials inside into high-purity metals. The process runs end to end, from battery procurement and dismantling to refining and metal recovery. Batteries are dismantled under water, which eliminates the fire risk and toxic gas release associated with conventional crushing methods.
• The startup designs and builds most of its machinery, including magnetic separators, density separators, agitators, boilers, furnaces, mills and shredders.
• Lithium is sold to glass manufacturers, ceramics producers, cement companies, and grease manufacturers. Nickel’s largest global consumer remains the stainless-steel industry, and Metastable’s output can feed into that supply chain. Cobalt is used in pigment manufacturing and magnet production. Copper goes into casting and bus bar manufacturing. Aluminium is primarily sold into automotive casting applications.

Funding Alert

Startup: Raghu Vamsi Aerospace Group

Amount: $40M

Round: Series B

Startup: Plazza

Amount:  $15M

Round: Series A

News 

OpenAI elevates Uday Ruddarraju to CTO of Compute

OpenAI has promoted Uday Ruddarraju to the role of chief technology officer for Compute as access to large-scale computing infrastructure has become one of the defining competitive factors in AI.

The appointment comes as AI companies race to secure the processing power, networking and data-centre capacity needed to build increasingly capable foundation models.

What this means: 

• Uday Ruddarraju’s new role highlights a broader shift across the AI industry. While new models often attract the attention, companies are investing heavily in the underlying infrastructure needed to train and deploy them.
• The announcement comes as major AI developers continue expanding their infrastructure footprints. OpenAI has been increasing investment in computing capacity to support newer generations of models, while rivals including xAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta are also investing billions of dollars in advanced chips and data centres to meet rapidly growing demand for AI services.
• Outlining the scale of OpenAI’s ambitions Ruddarraju said, “We’re on a mission to build the world’s largest compute footprint so frontier AI can reach everyone and every workflow. We have a very exciting compute ramp and roadmap coming up. There is a lot to build across large-scale distributed systems, hardware, manufacturing, and data-centre builds.”

News & updates

• First close: Steptrade Capital, an Ahmedabad-based alternative investment fund (AIF) manager, has achieved the first close of its CAT II AIF, Chanakya Opportunities Fund II (COF II), by securing investment commitments worth Rs 100 crore.
• Rupee decline: The rupee declined to its weakest level in two months on Monday, as oil prices ​swayed near $90 per barrel amid the Middle East conflict, with ‌markets acutely sensitive to signs of diplomatic efforts to end hostilities, Reuters reported. 

What was the name of Apple’s short-lived personal digital assistant?

Answer: Newton

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