Discovered Materials Raises $9 Million in Seed Funding Led by Lightspeed India Partners
The startup was previously known as Matforge and is part of Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch.
Deeptech startup Discovered Materials has raised $9 million (approximately ₹85 crore) in a seed funding round 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 San Francisco-based startup, founded by IIT Madras alumni Akash Ramdas and Advaith Sridhar, will use the fresh capital to expand its team, build laboratory infrastructure and advance its AI agents for materials discovery, with an initial focus on materials for semiconductor applications.
Announcing the funding, Sridhar said in an X post that the company is focused on building AI scientists capable of accelerating materials research and moving discoveries from computation to physical validation.
Today, we're introducing @discoveredmat . We build AI scientists that discover new materials for semiconductor chips.
— Advaith Sridhar (@advaith_sridhar) August 10, 2026
We’re starting by releasing our work – hundreds of new materials discovered using frontier AI models, along with our benchmark for tracking progress in this… pic.twitter.com/1UdMjgjFQY
Discovered Materials is developing AI systems designed to work across the materials discovery process, including simulation, synthesis and experimental validation. The company aims to use AI agents to identify promising materials, determine how they can be synthesised and validate their performance through laboratory experiments.
The startup is particularly focused on materials for thermal management in advanced semiconductors. As AI processors become increasingly powerful, managing the heat generated by high-performance chips has emerged as a major challenge for the semiconductor industry. Discovered Materials is working on materials that could improve heat dissipation and support technologies such as advanced semiconductor packaging and 3D chip stacking.
According to the company, its AI systems can explore thousands of potential material candidates, compared with the limited number researchers can typically evaluate manually. The startup says its systems have already identified hundreds of potential new materials and several candidates with properties comparable to materials currently used by major chipmakers, although the specific compositions have not been disclosed.
The company is also developing Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on real-world materials-discovery problems. The benchmark aims to measure whether AI systems can move beyond generating theoretical candidates and solve materials problems that can ultimately be validated experimentally.
Discovered Materials plans to patent promising discoveries and eventually license the resulting technologies to semiconductor companies, giving the startup an intellectual-property-driven business model alongside its AI technology.
Co-founder Akash Ramdas has a PhD and postdoctoral research background in materials science from Stanford University, while Advaith Sridhar holds a master’s degree in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University. The founders first met at IIT Madras and bring expertise across materials science, artificial intelligence and autonomous AI systems.
The startup was previously known as Matforge and is part of Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch. Its latest funding comes as semiconductor companies and data-centre operators face growing challenges around chip performance, power consumption and thermal management.
The investment gives Discovered Materials additional capital to build its laboratory capabilities and develop AI agents that can operate across the full materials research cycle, as it seeks to address one of the growing technological bottlenecks in the development of next-generation AI and semiconductor infrastructure.