Advaith Sridhar

Advaith Sridhar is a co-founder of Discovered Materials, which builds AI scientists that discover materials for the semiconductor industry.^{[12]Launch YCMatforge: AI Scientists to discover new semiconductor materialsYC, Apr 21, 2026[13]Discovered MaterialsCompany websiteCompany} He holds a master's in AI from Carnegie Mellon and was the founding applied scientist at Persona AI, acquired by Luma Labs, where he built long-horizon autonomous agents.^{[12]Launch YCMatforge: AI Scientists to discover new semiconductor materialsYC, Apr 21, 2026[8]Y CombinatorDiscovered Materials company profileYC}

A San Francisco company in Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch (YC P26), building AI agents that find new materials for semiconductor chips, aimed at data centers and fabs.^{[8]Y CombinatorDiscovered Materials company profileYC} Finding a novel material today takes more than ten years of lab work.^{[8]Y CombinatorDiscovered Materials company profileYC[12]Launch YCMatforge: AI Scientists to discover new semiconductor materialsYC, Apr 21, 2026} The company aims to compress that to months.^{[8]Y CombinatorDiscovered Materials company profileYC}

Agents propose materials and synthesis recipes, while machine-learning tools compute stability, thermal conductivity, dielectric properties and mechanical properties.^{[10]Discovered MaterialsMaterial Discovery BenchCompany, 2026} The company says it makes best-effort attempts to validate candidates experimentally; its published benchmark found only one plausible synthesis route among more than 500 computationally generated materials.^{[10]Discovered MaterialsMaterial Discovery BenchCompany, 2026}

The company's open benchmark for agentic materials discovery: a long-horizon, open-ended research task where AI models search for new materials used in chips.^{[10]Discovered MaterialsMaterial Discovery BenchCompany, 2026[13]Discovered MaterialsCompany websiteCompany} It was built with input from researchers at IBM, imec, Stanford and Cambridge.^{[10]Discovered MaterialsMaterial Discovery BenchCompany, 2026}

A $9M seed round announced in August 2026, led by Lightspeed India Partners with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners, and angels including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar.^{[9]TechCrunchDiscovered Materials is playing AI whack-a-mole to hunt cooler chipsPress, Aug 10, 2026[13]Discovered MaterialsCompany websiteCompany}

Akash Ramdas, who did his MS, PhD and post-doc at Stanford in materials science and engineering.^{[8]Y CombinatorDiscovered Materials company profileYC[12]Launch YCMatforge: AI Scientists to discover new semiconductor materialsYC, Apr 21, 2026} The materials he found for nanoscale interconnects during his PhD have been adopted into the roadmaps of Intel and TSMC.^{[8]Y CombinatorDiscovered Materials company profileYC}