Kevin Weil, the former Chief Product Officer and VP of Science at OpenAI, launched Warp Sciences, a startup that wants to use AI and robotics to make the molecules that drug companies need, and do that work in the United States instead of China. Because advertises the company on X on Thursday, October 22 a $215 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Bloomberg reports the round’s value warped to $865 million after the new money.
IVP, Premji Invest, Lux Capital and more than a dozen other companies participated in the round. Angel investors include OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Figma CEO Dylan Field, according to the company’s announcement.
Four founders, one lab business
Weil is CEO. He joined OpenAI as chief product officer in 2024 before transitioning to lead its scientific efforts, and he left in April when OpenAI folded several side teams into its core operations. Prior to OpenAI, he held senior product roles at Twitter, Instagram and Planet Labs.
Its three co-founders come from very different backgrounds:
- Sol ReisbergChief scientific officer, previous medicinal chemistry leadership roles at Terremoto Biosciences.
- Manohar “Mano” PaluriCTO, was a VP at Meta Superintelligence Labs and a founding member of Meta’s FAIR research lab.
- DJ PatilCOO, was the first US Chief Data Scientist in the White House and a founding director at Devoted Health.
Warp won’t make his own medicine
Warp sets itself up as a chemistry contract research organization, or CRO. It does not plan to discover or possess drugs. Biotech and pharma companies will hire it to make and test molecules, and they will retain control of their own programs.
The first service is lead optimization, the stage where chemists synthesize many variants of a promising molecule so that researchers can compare them and narrow down a drug candidate. It’s slow, hands-on work, and drugmakers have long sent much of it to cheaper and faster Chinese companies like WuXi AppTec.
Warp is starting with about 20 people and has already bought robotic arms and AI chips, Bloomberg reports. Chemists will initially conduct experiments, wearing cameras and pressure-sensing gloves so that their work generates training data for the company’s own AI models. Over time, the plan is for AI to design experiments, robots to run them, and any results to feed back into the models.
“Chemistry and biology move forward when you make something, test it and learn from the result,” Weil said in the company’s announcement. At X, he argued that AI has moved quickly in software and mathematics, but still lags in drug discovery because “modelers don’t have access to the kind and volume of experimental data they need.”
The China angle
Weil also sees Warp as a way to bring outsourced drug chemistry back to the United States. A 2024 survey by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization found that 74% of responding biotech companies had contracts with Chinese companies for preclinical or clinical services.
Washington was pushing in the same direction. The BIOSECURE Act, signed into law in December 2025 as part of the annual defense bill, restricts federal procurement and contracts with designated “biotechnology companies of concern.” However, its bans are not expected to come into effect until 2027, when the government publishes its list of covered companies.
In his thread, Weil pointed to the Pentagon adding WuXi to its list of Chinese military companies in June. He revealed that a US judge blocked that designation in August after WuXi sued.
The tougher test is cost. Warp’s founders say robotics and automation make U.S. labs competitive on price, speed and quality, and Reisberg says customers also want stronger IP protection than foreign partners can offer. Matching the scale and pricing of established Chinese CROs with a 20-person team is a tall order, and Warp hasn’t yet said where its first lab will be.