IIT Madras alumni raised $9 million to solve a problem inside every AI chip: Can AI discover the materials of the future?

IIT Madras alumni Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas have co-founded Discovered Materials, a deep-tech startup using AI agents to accelerate the discovery of materials for semiconductor chips. The company, which raised $9 million in seed funding, aims to shorten materials development from years to months. Its AI systems have generated more than 500 computational material candidates, though only one initially showed a plausible synthesis pathway, highlighting the gap between theoretical discovery and real-world manufacturing.