A YC startup is putting $1M behind five unsolved materials science problems for AI

Discovered Materials, a months-old YC startup that uses AI to find chip materials, is offering $200,000 for each solution to five open materials science problems. Discovered Materials, a months-old, San Francisco startup using AI models to find new substances for building advanced chips, announced a million-dollar challenge for AI models to solve five critical problems in materials science. While frontier AI models have solved a remarkable series of outstanding mathematics problems and made progress in the life sciences, they have yet to truly plumb the complex physics in advanced materials. “It’s more difficult to specify problems clearly in materials science because it’s not like math, where you have a very specific definition and can get to a yes or no,” said Advaith Sridhar, a co-founder of Discovered Materials, which was part of Y Combinator’s spring 2026 batch.

“We came to this discussion [wondering], what are the grand challenges in this field? How do we know AI is making progress?” Though materials science doesn’t have an equivalent of the Millennium Prize Problems, Discovered Materials recruited an advisory group of academics at leading global universities to spell out five open problems. The company is offering a pool of prizes, worth $1 million in total, for solutions to the problems. “Across materials science, there are phenomena we observe but cannot explain,” Felipe Jornada,