Warp Sciences emerged from stealth on Thursday with 215 million dollars in funding and a plan to rebuild, in the United States, a piece of the drug discovery business that largely moved overseas: making and testing compounds. The round, led by Lightspeed, values the startup at 865 million dollars including the new money, according to the company's announcement.
The company is led by Kevin Weil, who served as OpenAI's chief product officer and vice president of science before leaving the lab about six months ago. Weil argues that artificial intelligence has transformed work that happens on a screen while leaving the physical sciences mostly untouched. "AI has dramatically accelerated software engineering and mathematics, but it has yet to make the same impact in the physical sciences," he said at the launch. "Chemistry and biology move forward when you make something, test it and learn from the result. If we want to build more capable AI for science, we need to generate real-world data at scale."
Warp is building a United States-based chemistry contract research organization, the kind of firm biotech and pharmaceutical companies hire to produce the molecules their drug programs need. Its first service is lead optimization analog synthesis: taking a promising molecule and making hundreds or thousands of variations on it, so a customer's scientists can compare the versions, improve performance and reduce side effects. Warp is not developing medicines of its own. "We're not developing drugs of our own," said co-founder and chief operating officer DJ Patil. "We're building the infrastructure for the people who do."
The automation plan starts with people. Experienced chemists will run experiments while wearing cameras and sensor gloves, capturing the details of lab work as training data. Robots will learn those tasks from the recordings and take on more of the bench work, operating around the clock, while data from every experiment trains Warp's AI models to decide what to make next. The roughly 20-person team has already bought robotic arms and AI chips, Bloomberg reported. The other co-founders are chief scientific officer Sol Reisberg, who led medicinal chemistry work at Terremoto Biosciences, and chief technology officer Mano Paluri, a vice president at Meta's Superintelligence Labs and a founding member of its FAIR research group. Patil was the White House's first chief data scientist.
The pitch lands in a changing market. For years, drugmakers have outsourced much of this labor-intensive synthesis work to contractors in China, such as WuXi AppTec, drawn by lower costs and fast turnaround. A 2024 Biotechnology Innovation Organization survey found 74 percent of companies surveyed held contracts with Chinese firms for preclinical and clinical services. The BIOSECURE Act, signed into law in December 2025, created a framework for restricting federal contracts and grants involving designated biotechnology companies of concern. Reisberg said overseas partners delivered speed and value, but he worried about protecting the IP behind his programs, and American boutique firms charge a price premium. Warp aims to match the overseas standard from labs in the United States without that markup.
Warp has not said where its lab will be or when it expects its first customers, and automating delicate chemistry is a very different challenge from automating software. But the investor list suggests the bet is being taken seriously: IVP, Mayfield, Lux Capital, Premji Invest and Menlo Ventures joined the round, alongside individual backers including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar. If AI can propose drug candidates faster than ever, the slow physical step of actually making them becomes the bottleneck — and Warp has raised a large sum to attack that step.