Warp Sciences funding: ex-OpenAI Kevin Weil raises $215 million

The Warp Sciences funding round brings one of OpenAI's best-known product leaders into drug discovery. Kevin Weil, who started and led OpenAI for Science, launched Warp Sciences on Thursday, Oct. 22, with $215 million at an $865 million valuation, TechCrunch reported. Lightspeed led the round, with IVP, Mayfield, Lux Capital, Premji Invest and Menlo Ventures taking part.

What happened

Warp builds AI-driven robotic labs that run medicinal chemistry for pharma and biotech companies. Human chemists wearing cameras and sensor gloves will teach robots lab tasks, so the machines can make and test compounds around the clock, TechCrunch said.

The target is lead optimisation, the stage before trials when chemists make, purify and test thousands of variations of a molecule. Good contract labs aim to finish a design round in two to three weeks, and a full program usually takes two to four years, Lightspeed wrote in its investment note. By hand, a chemist seldom manages more than roughly ten reactions daily.

Weil is chief executive. Sol Reisberg, a medicinal chemist who has taken five drugs into the clinic and worked at Gilead and Schrödinger, is chief scientific officer. Co-founder Mano Paluri helped found Meta's FAIR lab and worked on its Llama models; he leads the model and robotics work.

Why it matters

The pitch is partly geopolitical. Western drug makers send much of this work to contract labs in China, such as WuXi AppTec. A 2024 Biotechnology Innovation Organization survey found that 79% of the 124 companies that answered had at least one contract with, or bought from, a China-based contract maker, Lightspeed said. The BIOSECURE Act, which became law in December 2025, limits federal contracts that involve "biotechnology companies of concern."

Data is the other angle. Failed reactions are rarely published but are valuable for training chemistry models, and Warp's robots keep every result. That gives the Warp Sciences funding a data story as well as a services one.

Investors keep writing large checks for AI research teams with little revenue, as with Flapping Airplanes' $1 billion Series A and Legora's Series E this week. Warp differs because it sells physical lab capacity, which ties growth to robots, sites and chemists.

What's next

The economics explain the bet. Deloitte estimates the 20 biggest drug makers averaged $2.23 billion per approved drug in 2024, counting failures, and only about one in ten drugs that enter human trials is approved, Lightspeed noted. Weil previously led product at Twitter and Instagram and was chief product officer at OpenAI before starting its science unit.

Warp has not named customers or a lab location. Lightspeed's reasoning is set out in its investment note, which says pharma leaders want a domestic option and no U.S. provider is yet built to do the work at scale.

The first test of the Warp Sciences funding will be whether robots can match the speed and cost of offshore labs on real drug programs.