Akash Ramdas

Akash Ramdas has a PhD in materials science from Stanford University and has spent the last 11 years researching new materials for semiconductor chips, according to Discovered Materials. His work on new nanoscale interconnects was Stanford Engineering's most popular story of 2025. He is co-founder of Discovered Materials, which builds AI agents that discover new materials for semiconductor chips.

Early Days at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Ramdas and co-founder Advaith Sridhar first met at IIT Madras, more than 10 years before the company launched. Sridhar studied AI at Carnegie Mellon and was a research engineer building video models and agents at Persona AI and Luma Labs.

The company raised a $9 million seed round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV and angels including Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar. Alongside the launch, it open-sourced Material Discovery Bench, a benchmark for agentic materials discovery.

Focusing on Heat in AI Accelerators

Today's AI chips generate heat exceeding 140 watts per square centimetre, the company believes, according to The Economic Times. It will start with materials that address that problem.

Hemant Mohapatra, the Lightspeed partner who led the round, told TechCrunch the search is "a bit of playing whack-a-mole with atomic structures." A material that reduces heat might still be too difficult to manufacture into a chip, or might compromise electrical properties.