THE SHORT VERSION
● Raised — $215M Series A at $865M post-money
● Led by — Lightspeed, with IVP, Premji Invest and Lux Capital
● Founders — Kevin Weil, Manohar Paluri, DJ Patil, Solomon Reisberg
● Team size — about 20 people
Kevin Weil, who led OpenAI's AI-for-science division until earlier this year, launched Warp Sciences on 22 October with a $215 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at an $865 million post-money valuation. IVP, Premji Invest and Lux Capital participated, alongside angels including OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
The company targets molecular optimisation — the stage where researchers generate many chemical variants of a drug candidate to improve efficacy and reduce side effects. Warp combines automated labs with robotic arms, AI chips and custom models, with a stated goal of bringing work currently outsourced to Chinese contractors back to the US.
The founding team is unusually senior for a 20-person company: Manohar Paluri, former VP at Meta's Superintelligence Labs; DJ Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist under President Obama; and Solomon Reisberg, previously at Terremoto Biosciences. Lightspeed partner Guru Chahal joins the board. Note what is being funded here: not a model, but wet-lab automation wrapped around one. That is a materially harder business than an API, and a $865 million valuation on day one reflects the team rather than the traction.
Sources
Emergent