Warp Sciences Raises $215M for Robot Chemistry Labs

Warp Sciences, a start-up co-founded by former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil, has raised $215 million to build a US chemistry lab where expert chemists, AI and robots make and test molecules for drug developers, the company said in a release on Thursday.

The round was led by Lightspeed, with participation from investors including Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux and Menlo Ventures. TechCrunch reports that the funding values the company at $865 million, according to Weil’s announcement on X. The company’s release gives no valuation.

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A contract lab, not a drug developer

Warp says it is building a chemistry contract research organisation (CRO). Its first service will be “lead optimization analog synthesis”, making variations of molecules that scientists compare as they hunt for a drug candidate. Customers keep control of their programmes. “We’re not developing drugs of our own. We’re building the infrastructure for the people who do,” said DJ Patil, co-founder and COO.

Weil, the co-founder and CEO, was most recently Chief Product Officer and VP of Science at OpenAI. His co-founders are Sol Reisberg, chief scientific officer, who held medicinal chemistry roles at Terremoto Biosciences; Mano Paluri, CTO, formerly a VP at Meta Superintelligence Labs; and Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist at the White House.

“If we want to build more capable AI for science, we need to generate real-world data at scale,” Weil said. In an interview published by IVP, one of the backers, he described the starting point as “a small-molecule preclinical CRO”.

TechCrunch reports that the company’s chemists will wear cameras and sensor gloves to train robots on lab tasks.

Reshoring is the commercial pitch

Warp frames itself as a domestic alternative to overseas chemistry suppliers. Its release cites a 2024 Biotechnology Innovation Organization survey, as reported by Reuters, in which 74% of respondents had contracts with Chinese companies for preclinical and clinical services. It also points to the BIOSECURE Act, signed in December 2025, which set a framework for restricting federal procurement and funding involving designated biotech companies of concern. TechCrunch names WuXi AppTec as an example of the contractors biotech firms have used.

“I’ve worked with overseas chemistry partners that delivered speed and value, but I still worried about protecting the intellectual property behind our programs,” Reisberg said.

Lab data is the scarce ingredient

The more interesting bet sits underneath the service business. AI models for chemistry are limited by how much clean experimental data exists, and much of it sits inside private labs or offshore contractors. A lab that records every reaction, including failures, produces exactly the training material those models lack. Warp’s plan is to sell chemistry today and use the resulting data to make the lab more automated tomorrow.

That loop is promising but unproven. Robotic synthesis is far harder than robotic pipetting, and the release says experienced chemists will guide experiments while automation grows. TSN has covered earlier steps in this direction, including Multiply Labs’ robots for biologics and OpenAI’s own push into drug research with its Orchestra Bio purchase. If Warp can match offshore prices, as Reisberg suggests, US biotech firms gain a supplier that keeps sensitive work at home; if it cannot, the reshoring argument alone may struggle to win contracts.