Deeptech startup Discovered Materials raises $9M in Seed round

Discovered Materials, a deeptech startup co-founded by IIT-Madras alumni has raised $9 million in a seed round of funding led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners and angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar.

Discovered Materials in building AI agents to discover and accelerate the adoption of new materials for semiconductor chips. The startup said it has also released hundreds of new AI-discovered materials along with Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark for agentic materials discovery on real-world semiconductor chip problems.

According to the startup, AI chips generate extraordinary amounts of heat making thermal management the biggest bottleneck for the industry. New materials have the potential to fundamentally improve chip efficiency by enabling advanced packaging technologies such as 3D stacking while also dissipating heat more effectively. Discovered Materials' AI agents work across simulation, synthesis and experimental validation, helping researchers identify promising materials far faster than traditional R&D approaches.

Discovered Materials will primarily use this funding round to expand the team, lab and scale its AI research agents. The two founders of this startup are: Advaith Sridhar and 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," 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," he said.

Akash Ramdas has a PhD in materials science from Stanford University and Advaith Sridhar studied AI at Carnegie Mellon.

“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 Partners.