Ex-OpenAI Science Chief Launches $215M Warp Startup
Kevin Weil, who led OpenAI's AI-for-science program, has launched Warp Sciences with $215 million in funding to automate drug-discovery labs with robots and AI.
Kevin Weil, the former OpenAI executive who ran the company's AI-for-science program, has launched a new startup called Warp Sciences with $215 million in funding. The company came out of stealth on October 22, 2026, with a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The deal values the startup at $865 million after the new money, even though it has not shipped a public product yet.
From OpenAI's science lab to startup CEO
Weil spent nearly two years at OpenAI. He first joined as chief product officer, running the teams behind ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API. He then moved on to lead a unit called OpenAI for Science, which built GPT-Rosalind, a model trained on chemistry, protein engineering, and genomics. He left OpenAI on April 17, 2026, along with Sora lead Bill Peebles, when the company folded its science work into its core model, product, and infrastructure teams. About six months later, Warp Sciences came out of stealth. Weil is not alone. The founding team includes Manohar Paluri, formerly a vice president at Meta's Superintelligence Labs; DJ Patil, the White House's first chief data scientist; and Solomon Reisberg, a former Terremoto Biosciences executive who is Warp's chief scientific officer.
What Warp Sciences will actually do
Warp is going after a specific bottleneck in drug development: lead optimization. After researchers identify a promising molecule, scientists create and test hundreds or thousands of variants of it to improve how well it works and reduce side effects. This step is slow, expensive, and labor-intensive. Warp plans to automate this work with a fully robotic laboratory in the United States. The company is starting with a team of about 20 people and has already bought robotic arms and AI chips. Its chemists will wear cameras and pressure-sensing gloves while they run experiments, so the company can record the physical work and use it to train its own AI models. Its first service will be lead optimization analog synthesis for biotech and pharmaceutical customers. Weil said on X that the new funding will "bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab." He has also said the physical sciences have yet to get the lift from AI that has "dramatically accelerated software engineering and mathematics."
Why it matters: bringing the work back from China
Much of this molecule-making work is currently outsourced to contract research firms in China, such as WuXi AppTec, which compete on speed and cost. Relying on overseas contractors has become a growing political and supply-chain concern in the United States. Warp's pitch is to match the quality of those overseas partners from labs in the U.S., without the markup charged by boutique American research firms. If robots can do the work around the clock, the slowest and most expensive phase of drug development could get a lot faster. The round drew a heavyweight list of backers. Alongside Lightspeed, investors include IVP, Premji Invest, and Lux Capital, plus angel investors such as OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.