Former OpenAI Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil founded Warp Sciences, raising a $215 million Series A at an $865 million valuation

Smart Things (Zhidongxi) October 23 news: Last night, Kevin Weil, former Chief Product Officer and Vice President of Science at OpenAI, posted an announcement that his AI scientific research startup Warp Sciences has come out of stealth and completed a $215 million (approximately RMB 1.435 billion) Series A funding round.

According to Bloomberg, the round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from IVP, Premji Invest, Lux Capital and others. Following this round, Warp Sciences' post-money valuation reached $865 million (approximately RMB 5.771 billion).

A number of angel investors also participated in this round, including several of Weil's colleagues at OpenAI, such as OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar and former executive Fidji Simo, as well as tech industry figures including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Warp Sciences was recently founded in San Francisco, USA. The company plans to use AI, robotics and automated laboratories to help pharmaceutical companies complete the screening of molecular variants in drug development.

According to Bloomberg, Warp Sciences does not develop drugs itself, but instead serves the downstream experiments of drug development: after researchers identify promising molecules, they must produce hundreds or even thousands of slightly different versions and test each one for efficacy and side effects. Pharmaceutical companies have long outsourced this step to other companies, and Warp hopes to use AI and robotics to improve experimental efficiency.

1. Founded by a former OpenAI executive, targeting AI-driven drug development

Warp Sciences co-founder and CEO Weil joined OpenAI in 2024 as Chief Product Officer and later moved to Vice President of OpenAI for Science, responsible for promoting the application of AI in scientific research. In April of this year, Weil left OpenAI.

Warp Sciences' other co-founders include Manohar Paluri, former Vice President of Meta Superintelligence Labs; D.J. Patil, former first Chief Data Scientist of the White House; and Solomon Reisberg, former executive at Terremoto Biosciences.

▲Warp Sciences co-founders (Image source: Warp Sciences)

According to Bloomberg, the Warp Sciences team currently has about 20 people and is already equipped with hardware such as robotic arms and AI chips. Weil said that when Warp's chemists conduct experiments, they will use wearable cameras, gloves with pressure sensors and other devices to generate the data needed to train custom AI models.

Warp plans to combine frontier models and self-developed open-weight models to gradually build automated laboratories.

2. The AI pharmaceutical track is heating up, and Warp's future business may expand to more disciplines

The use of AI in drug development has become a hot area of focus for venture capital firms, and companies such as OpenAI are also positioning themselves in this track.

According to a previous Bloomberg report, Alphabet's Isomorphic Labs, which focuses on using AI models for drug discovery, has held early talks for a new funding round and is expected to reach a valuation of at least $40 billion (approximately RMB 266.98 billion).

Earlier this week, OpenAI also acquired Orchestra Bio. The company built a platform that uses AI Agents to help pharmaceutical companies manage the drug development process.

Warp Sciences does not intend to discover drugs itself, but instead focuses on a labor-intensive step in drug development. After researchers identify promising molecules, they usually have to create hundreds or even thousands of variants and test each one to see which versions have better efficacy and fewer side effects in humans. Warp hopes to use AI and robotics to improve experimental efficiency at this step.

Lightspeed Venture Partners partner Guru Chahal will join the Warp Sciences board of directors. He said that Lightspeed's portfolio companies in the life sciences field have real demand for this technology, and some may even become direct customers of Warp. In the long term, Warp also plans to expand its business from chemistry to more disciplines.

Warp Sciences seeks to involve AI in real experiments, recording the experimental process through cameras, sensors and robots, and then using that data to train models. At present, Warp's approach is still at an early stage, and whether it can operate stably and improve experimental efficiency remains to be verified.

From OpenAI's science projects to explorations by companies such as Isomorphic Labs, AI is becoming involved in scientific research processes such as experimental design, operation and analysis of results, and model capabilities are also beginning to be combined with experimental equipment, researchers and real-world data.

Sources: Bloomberg, Warp Sciences, X