YC-backed Discovered Materials offers a million-dollar prize to find AI solutions for five material science challenges.

San Francisco startup Discovered Materials (YC Spring 2026 cohort) has announced a $1 million prize pool to gather AI models that can solve five open problems in materials science, including the theory of copper oxide superconductivity, methods for predicting silicon-silicon dioxide interface structures, mapping grain structure to thermal properties, theories on how light changes material behavior, and improvements to density functional theory.