Material Revolution: A Portrait of CuspAI’s Chad Edwards

“How is it that such small things can have such a big impact?”

It’s a question that’s occupied Chad Edwards ever since he was a child, and one that offers insights to his own story. 

Growing up in rural Wales, his ADHD diagnosis might have easily meant he’d been left behind at school. But to his fortune, his science teachers showed the patience and attention to help him thrive. His science grades excelled, and so his fascination endured, leading him to become the first in his family to go to university to study Chemistry. 

Chad’s always been a very visual thinker, he admits, and sees science not as theoretical but as very literal. “I always saw chemistry as a form of computation.” Of steps, procedures, calculations, tangible outputs. And of small, barely visibly molecules triggering huge outcomes. 

Nowhere was this truer than in material science. Almost every single one of society’s most pressing challenges—the energy transition, climate change, compute shortage—boils down to something very simple. Materials, or rather, their scarcity. As he traversed academic disciplines and industries, he saw the same problem coming up around access to materials, and it soon became clear that this was to be the biggest economic challenge over the next century. 

Drawing on his innate ability to make the complex incredibly simple, Chad explains. “The need for new materials is clear. The need for a new way to invent materials is clear.”

CuspAI, the company Chad co-founded with Professor Max Welling, is a bold and different vision for AI. Not one that accelerates material shortages, but rather reverses it. It’s this exciting concept that makes it easy to understand why Chad, Max, and CuspAI have emerged as one of the most admired companies for scientists, investors, and big industrial players alike. 

The idea behind Cusp

Chad’s fascination with how small components can cause a big impact has, unsurprisingly, drawn him towards working in startups over big companies. It also suited his personality, specifically roles that have allowed him to wear many hats and inject high levels of energy.

“I’ve always been more excited by seeing immediate impact from 200% effort, rather than marginal impact at large entities.”

After graduating, he joined a company called Cambridge Quantum Computing, developing proprietary software, operating systems, and cybersecurity tools for quantum computers. As their first commercial hire, his job was “to figure out how the hell we make money from this thing”. 

He quickly found his niche at this intersection of technical and commercial, a particularly valuable proposition for a science-focused firm looking to translate their technology to buyers. His superpower, he suggests, was helping sitting at this interface and helping deep technologists understand how their technology could be applied in the real world. He built product roadmaps, and helped land major contracts with huge multinationals, the likes of BMW, Airbus, Totale, and Roche. 

The bigger picture soon came into focus. Companies spanning various industries all had the same problem—their demand for material innovation was not being met. Nor could it, using existing methods: developing new materials took years, if not decades. 

Adopting his technical-commercial mindset, he considered how existing technology could be adapted for this application. Against the backdrop of emerging generative AI technologies, he wondered: if AI can create prose, images, and code from prompts, why couldn’t we do this for materials and molecules? 

“If we could go from a text prompt to a physical visual representation of a material, this would be transformational for so many industries,” Chad says. 

Appropriate stars were starting to align. Professor Max Welling was leaving his role as VP at Microsoft Research. Max was (and still is) one of the most prominent thinkers in AI, and had literally invented a number of the techniques he was referring to in his thinking. If he could get Max on board, they would be starting with a materially more advanced technical base than practically anyone else in the space. 

Chad reached out to share his plans, and quickly saw they were on the same page. This was the perfect validation: “If Max was already thinking about this, then I knew we were on the right track.”

Building Cusp

CuspAI was born in 2024, the name reflecting the ‘cusp’ of the new era of material demand that we currently sit on, and which Chad and Max aspire to build the foundations of. The vision was to build a ‘search engine’ for material science: allowing customers to specify desired materials properties, search for candidate molecules or materials, generate synthesizable compounds, and validate its practical use through simulations.

All of this done at 10x quicker than traditional methods. Or as their mission statement reads, “unlocking materials breakthroughs in months, not millennia”.

Two years is short in the scope of great technological shifts and transitions. But in the world of AI, it feels like multiple lifetimes. Rumour has it that the company received a billion-dollar acquisition offer just months into their journey. 

Chad won’t be drawn on this, but he does say that he and Max felt they were building towards something bigger. “We know that we’re building a generational company. To let that go into somebody else’s hands or in a different direction would have felt very premature.”

This offer instead proved to be the jet fuel to propel them forwards. They emerged from stealth with a $30M seed round, and quickly secured major partnerships with Hyundai (for sustainable energy and mobility), Meta (for carbon capture technology), and Kemira (for removing PFAs from water). Last year, they closed their $100M Series A.

But for Chad, the greatest achievements remain the team that he’s assembled. CuspAI is often referred to as having one of the most cited founding teams for AI and material science. Chief Scientific Officer Professor Aron Walsh is a revered academic in computational chemistry and physics; Chief Strategy Officer Dr Markus Hoffmann joined having led Google Quantum AI’s partnerships function. All this is backed up by a phenomenal advisory board, including AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton and serial entrepreneur Yann Le Cun.

Despite their prestigious backgrounds, hiring criteria remains strong, prioritizing low ego and high EQ. “We have a very good ego filter at the door.” Chad’s central hiring philosophy has focused on three key things.

Firstly, to always hire people better than himself. If he feels uncomfortable in the interview that the candidate knows more than him, it's a good sign. Secondly, he identifies alignment with mission and intellectual curiosity. That’s key to encouraging people to jump ship from well-paid jobs into startup uncertainty. And finally, he looks for strong signs in the interview. “How people show up in interviews represents how they’ll show up on day one.”

Cusp would of course be nothing without his partnership with Max. Their personalities are highly complementary: Chad admits that the difference of their British and Dutch characteristics offers great balance, and an opportunity to set a direct but open culture for the team. 

The future

The AI material science space is much noisier now than when they started two years ago. But Chad is confident they have all the ingredients they need to win: differentiated GTM and commercialization strategy, an exceptional team, and a strong headstart. 

The CuspAI team is already spread across London, Cambridge, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Tokyo, with ambitions to expand into new geographies on the near horizon. Former head of Apple Intelligence John Giannandrea was revealed by the press to be joining to lead their US expansion and operations. 

Chad remains confident for the future. “I genuinely believe we’re moving into a new paradigm where materials no longer become the bottleneck.” 

He pictures a world where he can look around the world and point to products, businesses, industries with Cusp-designed materials at their core. It might not have the same ‘Apple logo’ recognition—”Most of our materials are going to be buried deep inside of devices and things.”

But Chad and Max will be comfortable in the knowledge that these things wouldn’t exist, or at least be readily available, without the foundations they’ve built.