Discovered Materials, a startup emerging from Y Combinator, has closed a $9 million seed round from Lightspeed India Partners, with investment from Peak XV Partners and angel investors Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar. Founded by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, the company uses swarms of AI agents to find new materials for building more efficient integrated circuits, addressing the heat generated by chips running AI workloads. The software pipeline employs Anthropic models in a custom harness to generate material leads, then uses trained foundational physics models to run simulations verifying candidates. Sridhar noted the system enables thousands of guesses daily versus about 20 during Ramdas’ PhD. The startup released examples of hundreds of new materials and its “Material Discovery Bench” today to track frontier models’ performance. It has discovered several materials matching properties of those used by major chipmakers but cannot share details. Challenges include manufacturing difficulty and compromised electrical properties. Lightspeed partner Hemant Mohapatra, who led the round, described the work as “playing whack-a-mole with atomic structures,” noting a material is useful only if all properties converge. He expects predicting novel substances will become commoditized, with Discovered Materials differentiated by Ramdas’ field experience and rapid lab validation. The company plans to patent valuable materials’ use in GPUs or chip-making processes and license them.