Discovered Materials, a San Francisco-based startup that just graduated from Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch, has raised $9 million to develop AI agents capable of discovering novel materials for semiconductors. The company was co-founded by Akash Ramdas, a PhD and postdoc in materials science at Stanford whose discoveries were adopted by Intel and TSMC, and Advaith Sridhar, a Carnegie Mellon master’s graduate, aiming to compress the traditionally lengthy materials discovery process from over a decade to just months. The goal is to address the growing power consumption and heat dissipation challenges of AI chips in data centers by identifying materials that can improve the thermal efficiency of current and next-generation chip designs. This substantial early-stage funding should give the team runway to validate promising candidates through simulation before moving to costly physical testing.
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