Max Welling is Co-Founder and CTO at CuspAI, a frontier AI company pioneering materials discovery using generative AI and molecular simulations. He is also a research chair in Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam.

Max earned his PhD in theoretical high energy physics under Nobel laureate Gerard 't Hooft at Utrecht University. He held postdoctoral positions at Caltech under Pietro Perona and at University of Toronto and UCL under Geoffrey Hinton.

Max is a fellow of CIFAR and ELLIS, recipient of the ECCV Koenderink Prize (2010) and ICML Test of Time award (2021). He served as associate editor in chief of IEEE TPAMI and was program chair and general chair of NeurIPS.

Before CuspAI, Max was Distinguished Scientist and VP at Microsoft Research AI4Science (2021-2024) and VP of Technology at Qualcomm after the company acquired his startup Scyfer in 2017. He supervised many influential PhD students at University of Amsterdam including Durk Kingma, Taco Cohen, and Thomas Kipf.

CuspAI raised $130M total funding (including $100M+ Series A in 2025) and has secured partnerships with Hyundai, Meta, and Kemira. The company's AI platform generates new materials up to 10x faster than traditional methods and contributed to OpenDAC, the world's largest direct air capture database with over 100 million datapoints.