Warp Sciences Inc., a drug discovery chemistry startup, launched Thursday with $215 million in funding, roughly six months after co-founder and Chief Executive Kevin Weil departed OpenAI Group PBC, where he oversaw science initiatives.
The company is building a chemistry contract research organization in the United States that will supply biotech and pharmaceutical customers with the molecules their drug programs require. Its first service is lead optimization analog synthesis, which generates variants of a promising molecule so customer scientists can compare them while narrowing toward a drug candidate.
Warp plans to use data from those physical experiments to train its artificial intelligence models, with experienced chemists overseeing the work as the laboratory adopts more automation. According to TechCrunch, robots will learn lab tasks by observing chemists equipped with cameras and sensor gloves. In the launch announcement, Weil said the physical sciences have not yet seen the gains AI has brought to software engineering and mathematics, and he argued that chemistry and biology progress through making and testing compounds, so scientific AI models need real-world data at scale.
Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer Sol Reisberg, who previously led medicinal chemistry at Terremoto Biosciences Inc., said his experience with overseas chemistry partners left him concerned about protecting the intellectual property behind his programs. Using a boutique U.S. contract research firm instead carries what he described as a price premium, and Warp aims to match the caliber of those overseas partners from U.S. labs without the markup.
Much of that overseas work goes to China: Reuters reported that 74% of the 124 biotech companies surveyed by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization in 2024 had contracts with Chinese companies for preclinical and clinical services. The BIOSECURE Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in December, now restricts federal contracts and grants involving designated biotechnology companies of concern.
Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer DJ Patil said that as a contractor Warp makes only the molecules its customers select and does not develop drugs of its own. Patil was a founding executive at Devoted Health Inc. after serving as the White House's first chief data scientist. The fourth co-founder, Chief Technology Officer Mano Paluri, was part of the team that started Meta Platforms Inc.'s AI research group before becoming a vice president at Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Lightspeed Venture Partners LP led the round. The 18 other participating firms include Institutional Venture Partners LP, Lux Capital Management and Menlo Ventures LP. Coinbase Global Inc. CEO Brian Armstrong and OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar invested as individuals, along with 11 other angel investors.
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