Warp Sciences raises $215M to put AI and robots into drug chemistry

Warp Sciences, a new company that wants to put AI and robotics inside the chemistry labs that serve drug developers, has raised a $215 million Series A led by Lightspeed. Kevin Weil, Warp’s CEO, announced the round in a LinkedIn post that his co-founder DJ Patil reshared. A round that size is a bet that lab automation can be run as a business rather than only shown in a demo.

Weil co-founded Warp with Patil, Manohar Paluri, a co-founder of FAIR, and Solomon Reisberg, whom he calls a drug hunter. He singles out Brian Spears, who he says helped reach Q>1 fusion at LLNL, as one of the early hires. The post does not say how many people work at Warp, or where its lab sits beyond placing it in America.

What Warp sells is chemistry as a service. Weil describes a next-generation preclinical CRO, a contract research organization, meaning a lab that builds and screens candidate molecules for the companies developing new drugs. Warp will not develop drugs of its own. “We’re building the infrastructure for the people who do,” Weil writes.

The company starts with people. Human chemists serve customers first, and Warp then automates that work one workflow at a time, with its own scientists building the tools and testing them at the bench. The post names no customers and gives no count of how many there are.

Weil’s logic runs in a loop. Each automated step lets the lab run more experiments, the experiments produce data for training science models, and better models help design the next round of experiments and take over more of the manual steps. In his words, “The lab improves the AI, and the AI improves the lab.” The commercial angle is that a company running the experiments itself holds the data its models learn from, which a software-only lab does not.

The first of Weil’s two reasons for building Warp is exactly that: robotic labs can run experiments at huge volume and produce training data along the way. The second is political. He argues that the United States has to bring critical scientific capabilities back from China, or it will lose its pharma industry the way it lost solar, drones, and manufacturing. That is an argument, and the post backs it with no figures on how much preclinical chemistry currently happens in China. It does give American drug developers a patriotic reason to pick a domestic supplier, which may matter at the margin when two quotes are close.

Lightspeed leads the round and 27 other firms joined, among them Premji Invest, IVP, Mayfield, Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, and SignalFire. The angel list includes Reid Hoffman, Sarah Friar, Mike Krieger, Mark Chen, and Fidji Simo, “and many more,” as Weil puts it. He says these are people Warp’s founders have learned from and built alongside.

Weil’s post gives no valuation, no customer names, no timeline for automation, and no results from the lab. The plan is therefore all the public can judge so far. Preclinical chemistry is a field where buyers compare turnaround time and cost per compound, and until Warp publishes either against a conventional CRO, a drug company deciding where to send its next batch of molecules has nothing to weigh against its current vendor.

Reported from a LinkedIn post by Kevin Weil, CEO of Warp Sciences, reshared by co-founder DJ Patil.