AI materials startup Discovered Materials raises $9 million seed round

The IIT Madras alumni-founded company is using AI agents to accelerate the discovery of semiconductor materials and has released hundreds of AI-discovered materials alongside a new industry benchmark

Discovered Materials, a startup founded by two IIT Madras alumni, has raised $9 million (about ₹85 crore) in seed funding to build AI agents that can discover new materials and speed their adoption in semiconductor chips. The company also unveiled hundreds of AI-discovered materials and Material Discovery Bench, which it describes as the first benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on real-world semiconductor materials-discovery problems.

 

The round is led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners and angel investors including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar. The funding will accelerate the company's mission: making new materials discovery fast enough to keep pace with AI's demand for compute. By leveraging AI to compress months of interdisciplinary research into days, Discovered Materials aims to accelerate breakthroughs that can improve chip performance while reducing power consumption and heat generation.

 

 

"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."

 

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; his work on new nanoscale interconnects was Stanford Engineering's most popular story of 2025. Ramdas studied AI at Carnegie Mellon and was a research engineer building video models and agents at Persona AI (acquired) and Luma Labs. The seed funding will be used to expand the team and the lab, and scale the company's AI research agents.

 

“AI is creating unprecedented demand for better chips, but progress is increasingly constrained by how slowly new materials reach production," said Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed India Partners. “We're excited to partner with Discovered Materials as they build the future of semiconductor innovation, starting with a very urgent wedge on better heat dissipation from increasingly hotter chips.”

 

Today's AI chips generate extraordinary amounts of heat, making thermal management one of the industry's biggest bottlenecks. 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.

 

To study the rapid progress of these AI agents and measure their ability, the company also released hundreds of new materials discovered by frontier AI models for semiconductor applications. Alongside this, it introduced Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark developed in collaboration with experts from academia and industry. The benchmark evaluates frontier AI models on real-world semiconductor materials problems and will continue evolving through simulation and experimental validation.