Cambridge and Amsterdam-based CuspAI has appointed Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun to its advisory board. The buzzy startup, which uses AI to discover new materials, has also poached three former Google DeepMind staffers in recent weeks.
Founded in 2024, CuspAI is a “search engine for materials, enabling users to input the properties they want a material to have, and then generate the chemical composition needed to achieve it.
Geoffrey Hinton, the former Google AI researcher who shared a Nobel Prize in Physics last year, joined Cusp’s board in June last year, when it raised a $30m seed round.
LeCun was once Hinton’s post-doc student and is equally revered in the AI world, having developed some of the basic algorithmic LeCun and Hinton were co-recipients of the Turing Award in 2018 (considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computer science).
LeCun told Fortune, who first reported he had joined Cusp’s board, that he was excited to help Cusp as it tries to discover new materials that can help advance environmental sustainability.
Cusp appointed Verity Harding, a former Google DeepMind head of public policy to its advisory board.
Other recent hires include former DeepMind staffers Sina Samangooei, who was a senior research engineer at the Google AI lab and Hannah Openshaw, who had been the program lead for DeepMind’s “Multi-World Agent team,” Fortune reported.
Alessandro de Maria, first employee at DeepMind spinout Isomorphic Labs, also joined Cusp in January, as VP of platform engineering.
Cusp’s seed round drew in cash from a roll call of well-known VCs from Europe and the US. Hoxton led the round, with Lightspeed, Basis Set, Northzone, Giant Ventures, FJ labs, Zero Prime Ventures and Tiferes Ventures also participating.
Mehdi Ghissassi and Dorothy Chou, both senior leaders at Google DeepMind, also participated as angel investors.
