Oxford Nanopore co-founder joins Matter Machine’s £4M round: can Liverpool take on CuspAI?

Matter Machine has closed a £4 million pre-Series A round and pulled in a heavyweight to help spend it. Gordon Sanghera, who co-founded Oxford Nanopore and ran it for more than 20 years, has joined the Liverpool spinout to lead commercialisation. He stepped down as Oxford Nanopore’s chief executive on March 2 and moved to Matter Machine on October 12.

The funding round was led by IP Group, with Northern Gritstone and the University of Liverpool Enterprise Fund also backing it. Other investors in the round included Norrsken Evolve, LYVA Labs and the Northern Universities Venture Fund, which is managed by Parkwalk, IP Group’s fund-management arm. The round was oversubscribed, and the company says the money will go into growing the team, developing the platform and building relationships with commercial partners.

Matter Machine sits at the University of Liverpool’s Materials Innovation Factory, a site funded by Unilever and built at a cost of £81 million. Its platform is aimed at inorganic crystalline materials used in batteries and catalysts, combining AI prediction with experimental work and materials characterisation. That mix is the pitch: not just smarter software, but a loop between machine learning and lab work.

The company was set up by Matt Rosseinsky, a professor of inorganic chemistry at Liverpool since 1999. Rosseinsky’s group created an AI tool in 2021 that found four new materials, including lithium-conducting solid-state compounds relevant to solid-state batteries, though it is not clear whether that work has been licensed. Rosseinsky, who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2008, received an OBE in 2024 and the Royal Society’s Royal Medal for Physical Sciences.

The timing is awkward and interesting in equal measure. CuspAI in Cambridge raised $450 million in July and is now valued at $2.6 billion, while other AI materials players are raising far larger sums too. Matter Machine’s bet is that strong science, a veteran operator and a university network can still turn a £4 million start into customers before the richer rivals lock up the field.