Kevin Weil, pictured at Web Summit in 2019, led OpenAI for Science before founding Warp Sciences.
Kevin Weil, who led OpenAI for Science, has launched Warp Sciences with $215M led by Lightspeed, valuing it at $865M, Bloomberg reported. It is building an automated lab in the US for a drug development step that pharma companies have long outsourced to Chinese firms such as WuXi AppTec.
Kevin Weil, who led OpenAI’s science unit until he left in April , has launched a startup that uses AI to speed up a key step in drug development, Bloomberg reported . Warp Sciences came out of stealth on Thursday with $215M in funding.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which values Warp at $865M including the new money, according to the company. IVP, Premji Invest and Lux Capital also invested. Angel investors include OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Warp won’t discover drugs itself. Once researchers find a promising molecule, they often make hundreds or thousands of versions of it to make it work better and cut side effects. Drugmakers have long sent that work to Chinese firms, especially WuXi AppTec, because they are cheaper and faster.
That reliance has grown riskier as US-China tensions reach drug supply chains. In June, the Pentagon added WuXi AppTec to its list of companies it says are linked to China’s military, though a judge blocked the move in August. Some drugmakers also worry about sharing sensitive data with Chinese contractors, Weil told Bloomberg.
Warp wants to bring that work back to the US with a fully automated lab. Its team of about 20 has already bought robotic arms and AI chips. Its chemists will wear cameras and pressure-sensing gloves during experiments to create data for training its own AI models.
“ It’s still an area where frontier AI models are not yet changing the world in the way models are changing the world in software engineering and math, ” Weil said. “ That’s because the field is so much more experimentally driven. The models need to see that data. ”
His co-founders are Manohar Paluri, a former vice president at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs, DJ Patil, the White House’s first chief data scientist, and Solomon Reisberg, formerly of Terremoto Biosciences. Weil is the second former OpenAI leader this week to raise big money to make things in the US. On Tuesday, Bob McGrew’s Arda raised $232M for AI that sets up factory lines.
Investors are piling into AI for drug research, and OpenAI-backed Chai Discovery raised $400M in July. OpenAI bought Orchestra Bio, which helps drugmakers run drug development with AI agents, this week. That same month, OpenAI researcher Miles Wang was reported to be raising about $200M for his own drug startup, with Lightspeed in talks to lead.
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.
