Kevin Weil, who headed OpenAI’s science unit until his departure in April, has launched Warp Sciences with $215 million in funding. Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the round values the company at $865 million, including the new capital. Other investors include IVP, Premji Invest and Lux Capital, alongside individuals such as OpenAI finance chief Sarah Friar, Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Rather than discovering drugs, Warp intends to automate the optimisation of promising molecules. Researchers typically produce hundreds or thousands of variants to improve effectiveness and reduce side effects. Pharmaceutical companies have long outsourced this work to Chinese contractors, notably WuXi AppTec, because of their lower costs and faster delivery. That dependence has become riskier amid US-China tensions affecting drug supply chains. In June, the Pentagon placed WuXi AppTec on a list of companies it alleges have links to China’s military, although a judge blocked the move in August. Weil also cited drugmakers’ concerns about disclosing sensitive data to Chinese contractors.
Warp is building a fully automated US laboratory. Its roughly 20-person team has purchased robotic arms and AI chips, while chemists will wear cameras and pressure-sensing gloves during experiments to generate training data for proprietary AI models. Weil argues that the experimentally driven nature of the field makes such data essential. His co-founders are former Meta Superintelligence Labs vice president Manohar Paluri, the White House’s first chief data scientist DJ Patil, and Solomon Reisberg, formerly of Terremoto Biosciences.
