Called Warp Sciences, the startup has raised $215 million in Series A funding led by venture capital firm Lightspeed, with participation from Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux Capital, and Menlo Ventures among others.

Several of Weil's former OpenAI colleagues, including Fidji Simo, Mark Chen, Sarah Friar, Srinivas Narayanan, Sebastien Bubeck, Kate Rouch and Bob McGrew, also participated in the funding round.

Other tech leaders who joined the round include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Figma co-founder Dylan Field, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Parallel founder Parag Agrawal.

The list of participants also includes Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Skild AI co-founder Deepak Pathak, Mercor co-founder Brendan Foody, Physical Intelligence co-founder Lachy Groom and Databricks co-founder Ion Stoica.

What does Warp Sciences do?

Warp Sciences, which also counts former Terremoto Biosciences executive Solomon Reisberg as a co-founder, is building infrastructure to help people discover new medicines faster.

This includes establishing a next-generation preclinical contract research organization (CRO) in the United States to make and test molecules for companies developing new medicines.

"AI has dramatically accelerated software engineering and mathematics, but it has yet to make the same impact in the physical sciences," said Weil, co-founder and CEO of Warp Sciences.

"Chemistry and biology move forward when you make something, test it and learn from the result. If we want to build more capable AI for science, we need to generate real-world data at scale," he said.

DJ Patil, COO of Warp Sciences, said the company's "biotech and pharma customers determine which molecules to pursue and retain control of their drug programmes. We're not developing drugs of our own."

Weil said robotic labs could enable scientific experiments at a massive scale, generating the data needed to train powerful AI models for scientific research.

"For the first time, frontier AI and robotics enable labs that can run around the clock, testing ideas relentlessly to find new cures and novel solutions," the company stated. "Scientists direct the questions that matter, AI designs experiments, robots execute the work, and every result makes the entire system smarter."

Warp Sciences' initial focus

Paluri, serving as CTO of Warp Sciences, said in a LinkedIn post the startup's initial focus would be on lead optimisation in small-molecule drug discovery.

"We're building for drug hunters to accelerate their work, tightly integrating AI and robotics into the experimental process. We want to build real-world systems that deliver value, learn from every experiment, and compound over time," he said.

Paluri said, "Our goal is simple: every experiment should make the next one smarter...We're building the software, AI and robotics alongside the lab so each part is shaped by what chemists actually need"

Warp Sciences will initially work with experienced chemists on real-world projects for customers, gradually automating their workflows as scientists help develop and validate the tools in the lab.

Paluri noted that scientists would remain central to the process, defining problems, guiding research and determining what success looks like.

"AI and robotics are powerful tools. But the expertise of scientists is what makes those tools useful." he said.

An alumnus of IIIT Hyderabad, Paluri was one of the co-founders of Facebook AI Research (FAIR) and led Meta's Llama organisation as part of its AI efforts. He also helped build the company's image and video understanding capabilities.

He later led the Media Applied Research organisation within Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) as vice-president, where his team focused on multimodal understanding and generation.

AI giants step up their drug discovery push

Earlier this week, OpenAI acquired Orchestra Bio, a startup building AI agents to help pharmaceutical companies manage the drug development process. The ChatGPT maker plans to integrate Orchestra Bio's team and technology into Rosalind, its AI models and tools for life sciences research.

Anthropic also introduced Claude for Life Sciences in June, a suite of AI tools designed to help researchers with drug discovery, bioinformatics and clinical development.

Meanwhile, Isomorphic Labs, a Google DeepMind spinoff focused on AI-powered drug discovery, raised $2.1 billion in a funding round led by Thrive Capital in May, a year after securing $600 million in its first external funding round in March 2025.