Science, materials and math

• Chad Edwards: co-founder and CEO; "a chemist turned technology entrepreneur" who previously worked at Quantinuum (SiliconANGLE, Sep 10, 2025)
• Max Welling: co-founder; AI expert and former vice president of technology at Qualcomm (SiliconANGLE, Sep 10, 2025)

• Sep 10, 2025, Series A: $100 million, valued at $520 million (one unnamed source; CuspAI declined to comment). Investors named: NEA (co-lead), Temasek (co-lead), NVentures, Samsung Ventures, Hyundai Motor Group (Fortune, Sep 10, 2025)
• Jul 20, 2026, Series B: $450 million, valued at $2.6 billion (per Bloomberg, as cited by Quartz). Investors named: Kleiner Perkins (co-lead), NEA (co-lead), Bezos Expeditions, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Lux Capital, AMD Ventures, UK Sovereign AI Venture Fund, Temasek, Prosus (Quartz (via Yahoo Finance), Cris Tolomia; valuation attributed to Bloomberg, Jul 20, 2026)

Series B figures are from Quartz, which attributes the valuation to Bloomberg; Quartz is not on the trusted-outlet list and the Bloomberg piece was not fetched. Advisers include Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton, per the same report.

• Carina Hong: Stanford Ph.D. student; MIT bachelor's in mathematics and physics; Oxford master's; 2023 Morgan Prize winner (SiliconANGLE, Oct 2, 2025)
• Shubho Sengupta: former Meta Platforms AI researcher who helped develop Meta's Llama LLMs (SiliconANGLE, Oct 2, 2025)

• Oct 2, 2025, Seed (reported as a first funding round): $64 million, valued at $300 million. Investors named: B Capital (lead), Greycroft, Madrona Ventures, Menlo Ventures (SiliconANGLE, Oct 2, 2025)
• Mar 12, 2026, Series A: $200 million, valued at $1.6 billion. Investors named: Menlo Ventures (lead), Greycroft, Madrona, B Capital (Axios Pro, Pro Rata Premium: First Look (Lucinda Shen), Mar 12, 2026)

• Putnam 2025 solutions are published as Lean 4 code in a public package registry, so anyone can machine-check them; no third-party audit was found. (Lean Reservoir package page, AxiomMath/Putnam2025, Sep 7, 2026)

Founding year not stated on any page fetched. Forbes Italia says Hong left Stanford after a conversation 'last autumn' (article dated 2025-10-02). Series A source is an Axios Pro newsletter item; Pulse 2.0 (2026-03-13) reports 'above $1.6 billion'. The company blog lists posts through Oct 2026.

• Vlad Tenev: co-founder; Robinhood CEO (TechCrunch, Jul 28, 2025)
• Tudor Achim: CEO and co-founder (TechCrunch, Jul 28, 2025)

• Jul 28, 2025, Series B: $100 million, valued at $875 million. Investors named: Kleiner Perkins (lead) (TechCrunch, Jul 28, 2025)
• Nov 25, 2025, Series C: $120 million, valued at $1.45 billion. Investors named: Ribbit Capital (lead), Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Emerson Collective (new) (Harmonic (company), Nov 25, 2025)
• Jan 15, 2026, Series C (Nvidia joins): part of the $120 million Series C, valued at $1.45 billion. Investors named: Nvidia (new) (Axios, Jan 15, 2026)

Harmonic says Aristotle produced formally verified (Lean 4) solutions to five of six 2025 IMO problems, which it calls gold medal-level; this is the company's claim and no third-party evaluation was found. Reuters puts total raised at $295 million. The newest item on Harmonic's news page is dated 2026-02-11 (a $300,000 donation to Lean FRO).

• Liam Fedus: former VP of Research at OpenAI who helped create ChatGPT (Wilson Sonsini (law firm advising Periodic Labs), Sep 30, 2025)
• Ekin Dogus Cubuk: previously led the materials and chemistry team at Google Brain and DeepMind (Wilson Sonsini (law firm advising Periodic Labs), Sep 30, 2025)

• Sep 30, 2025, Seed: $300 million, valued at $1.3 billion (as later reported by Forbes). Investors named: Andreessen Horowitz (lead), Felicis, DST Global, NVIDIA, Accel, Elad Gil, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean, Jeff Bezos (Wilson Sonsini (law firm advising Periodic Labs), Sep 30, 2025)
• May 7, 2026, New round (not named); reported, not confirmed by company: at least $500 million, valued at $7.5 billion. Investors named: AMP (lead, per sources) (Forbes (Forbes Australia reprint; forbes.com original dated 2026-05-07), May 14, 2026)

The May 2026 round (at least $500M at $7.5B, led by AMP) comes from people familiar speaking to Forbes; Periodic did not respond and AMP declined to comment. Forbes also cites a March 2026 Bloomberg report of talks at at least $7B. The company launched publicly on 2025-09-30; no founding year is stated on a page fetched.

• Geoffrey von Maltzahn: co-founder and CEO (Reuters names no other founders) (Reuters (via Yahoo Finance), Krystal Hu, Oct 14, 2025)

• Oct 14, 2025, Series A extension (Series A total $350 million): $115 million, valued at more than $1.3 billion. Investors named: NVentures (Nvidia, new), Flagship Pioneering, General Catalyst, subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (Reuters (via Yahoo Finance), Krystal Hu, Oct 14, 2025)
• Jun 3, 2026, Series B (in talks; not confirmed closed): about $2 billion, valued at about $8.5 billion pre-money. Investors named: CalPERS (anchor, per sources), NVentures (anchor, per sources) (Bloomberg News (via Bloomberg Law), Michelle F. Davis, Jun 3, 2026)

Lila was incubated by Flagship Pioneering. Reuters put total funding at $550 million as of Oct 2025. The $2B Series B is from people familiar (Bloomberg); no closing was confirmed on any page fetched. Company calls itself "the world's first Operating System for Science" (company claim).

• Sam Rodriques: CEO and co-founder; physicist and bioengineer who briefly ran an academic lab at the Francis Crick Institute before launching FutureHouse (Edison Scientific team page (company))
• Andrew White: co-founder and CTO; former professor in machine learning for chemistry; led ChemCrow, ether0 and paperqa (Edison Scientific team page (company))

• Dec 18, 2025, Seed: $70 million. Investors named: Triatomic Capital (co-lead), Spark Capital (co-lead), unnamed U.S. institutional biotech investor (co-lead), Pillar VC, Susa Ventures, Striker Venture Partners, Hawktail, Olive Tree Capital (SiliconANGLE, Dec 18, 2025)

Commercial spinout of the non-profit FutureHouse (started 2023). The company reports 79.4% of Kosmos conclusions were accurate, from its own evaluation; no third-party evaluation was found. A $250M valuation for the seed round appears only on Caproasia (not a listed trusted outlet) and is left out.

• Jonathan Godwin: cofounder and CEO; former Google DeepMind researcher, five years on AI for science and advanced materials (Fortune, May 28, 2026)
• James Gin-Pollock: cofounder and CTO; repeat AI founder who sold a company to Shutterstock (Fortune, May 28, 2026)
• Daniel Miodovnik: cofounder and COO (Fortune, May 28, 2026)

• May 28, 2026, Series B: $50 million. Investors named: Plural (lead), NVentures, Radical Ventures, Compound, Fly Ventures (Fortune, May 28, 2026)

• UniFFBench, by researchers at IIT Delhi, Intel Labs and NVIDIA, benchmarked six force-field models including Orb against experimental data; Orb "exhibits failure across all elastic tensor components, with MAPE values consistently exceeding 80%" while doing well on structural metrics (preprint). (arXiv 2508.05762 (IIT Delhi, Intel Labs, NVIDIA authors), Aug 2025)

Fortune says the company has offices in London and San Francisco and names no single HQ; country set to UK on the London base. It has a multi-year AWS partnership announced Dec 2024 (per Fortune). Customers are unnamed.

• Jia Haojun (贾皓钧): CEO; MIT PhD under Heather Kulik; previously at Dow Chemical's global R&D headquarters (21st Century Business Herald (21jingji), Sep 19, 2026)
• Duan Chenru (段辰儒): CTO; previously researched at Microsoft Azure Quantum; MIT Kulik-group alumnus (21st Century Business Herald (21jingji), Sep 19, 2026)

• Jun 5, 2024, Seed: nearly US$10 million (Deep Principle news page (company))
• Nov 24, 2025, Series A: over RMB 100 million (Deep Principle news page (company))
• Jul 2026, Series A (A系列) close; cumulative funding: nearly RMB 1 billion cumulative (近10亿元). Investors named: Fortune Capital (孚腾资本), Huakong Fund (华控基金), Kangjun Capital (康君资本), Shunxi Fund (顺禧基金), Hillhouse Ventures (高瓴创投), Lenovo Capital (联想创投) (21st Century Business Herald (21jingji), Sep 19, 2026)

• Peer-reviewed paper co-authored by both founders: 'Optimal transport for generating transition states in chemical reactions', Nature Machine Intelligence 7, 615-626, doi:10.1038/s42256-025-01010-0 (company affiliation not shown on the citation page). (Kulik group, MIT (citation of Nature Machine Intelligence 7, 615-626), Apr 2025)

The 'what' quote translates as: a startup founded only two years ago that uses AI to discover new materials has caught the attention of capital. Round-by-round amounts before July 2026 come from the company's own news list. No valuation found. Customer results (e.g. L'Oréal: about 80% of recommended molecules outperformed previous ones) are as reported by 21jingji from the company.

• Joseph Krause: CEO; Rice University PhD; worked at the Army Research Lab before joining AlleyCorp as an investor (R&D World, Julia Rock-Torcivia, Jan 29, 2026)
• Jorge Colindres: President; from AlleyCorp (R&D World, Julia Rock-Torcivia, Jan 29, 2026)

• Jul 20, 2025, Seed (R&D World calls it Seed+): $55 million. Investors named: RTX Ventures (lead, per R&D World), Nvidia, noa, Eni Next, Infinite, AlleyCorp (FinSMEs, Jul 20, 2025)

Smaller than most in this list; included as a distinctive autonomous-lab company. R&D World mentions a later $60M Series A without a date or source; not verified. Gerbrand Ceder (formerly Berkeley Lab's autonomous lab) is Chief Science Officer.

• Mathieu Galtier: CEO; former early Owkin employee and its Chief Data & Platform Officer (Cathay Capital (investor in Entalpic), Sep 11, 2024)
• Victor Schmidt: CTO; from Mila, Yoshua Bengio's AI research lab (Cathay Capital (investor in Entalpic), Sep 11, 2024)
• Alexandre Duval: CSO; from Mila (Cathay Capital (investor in Entalpic), Sep 11, 2024)

• Sep 4, 2024, Seed: €8.5 million. Investors named: Cathay Innovation (co-lead), Breega (co-lead), Felicis (co-lead) (Axios Pro Climate Deals, Katie Fehrenbacher, Sep 4, 2024)

Small European company included for EU coverage. Searched the company homepage, Axios Pro and investor pages; the site names an 'Atomistic Discovery Engine' but no dated product, model or paper. Co-lead list comes from investor Cathay Capital's own post. No 2025-2026 funding found.