{"id":99882,"title":"Matforge - AI Scientists to discover new semiconductor materials","tagline":"Discovering 10x better materials for use in next generation electronic chips","body":"# Accelerating scientific discovery\n\n**Tl:dr** We’re building AI scientists to discover new materials for the semiconductor industry. If you know **Packaging/thermal engineers** at chip companies like NVIDIA, AMD, Groq, Cerebras, Google, Intel, Samsung, TSMC etc, please put us in touch! \n\n—----------\n\nDiscovering a material with commercial viability is usually a story of persistence.\n\nThe incandescent lightbulb filament came not from a single guess, but from Edison trying **6000+** candidate materials over 20 years. The first transistor ever made in Bell labs was famously **not with silicon**, but germanium.\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=99882\u0026key=user_uploads/3366857/c84e2115-5738-4845-a320-4825fc7ae0c8)\n\n_(left) The first transistor, made from Germanium. (right) some materials Edison tried as lightbulb filaments_\n\nThe same holds true in the semiconductor industry. We really need better materials for our chips, but finding them takes 10+ years of lab work.\n\nAt Matforge, we build AI agents to **accelerate** this process of finding new materials for the semiconductor industry. Our agents work across the entire materials discovery process - coming up with new candidates, synthesizing them and testing them in **physical labs.**\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=99882\u0026key=user_uploads/3366857/fa73a824-db61-4271-8160-39c58b55b6d3)\n\n**The founders -** Advaith has a Masters in AI from **Carnegie Mellon**, and was most recently a **research engineer** at Luma Labs, building agent harnesses and working on frontier models. Akash has a Masters, PhD and PostDoc from **Stanford University** in **materials discovery** for the semiconductor industry. We’ve known each for the last **11 years**, and have even written a book together!\n\nBreakthrough materials will still take many, many experiments. But for the first time, a small team might just have the tools to speed up this search and win.","slug":"Pz0-matforge-ai-scientists-to-discover-new-semiconductor-materials","created_at":"2026-04-21T16:04:21.392Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T01:56:12.533Z","total_vote_count":25,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Pz0-matforge-ai-scientists-to-discover-new-semiconductor-materials","share_image_url":"//bookface-static.ycombinator.com/assets/ycdc/yc-og-image-c440a0ad1dacfb86eeeb343717479cc54d256614449b4ef719977a0a451f8bc8.png","company":{"id":31362,"name":"matforge","slug":"matforge","url":"https://matforge.ai/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/910cd5b0344664a22b57c59a7d459cabe1095bee.png","batch":"Spring 2026","industry":"Industrials","tags":["Artificial Intelligence","Advanced Materials","Semiconductors","AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/31362"}}