Ex-OpenAI’s Kevin Weil, Former Meta AI leader Manohar Paluri's startup bags $215 million from Lightspeed, Premji Invest, others- Moneycontrol.com

Former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil is joining forces with Manohar Paluri, a former Meta AI leader of Indian origin, and Indian-American DJ Patil, the White House’s first chief data scientist, to launch a startup that uses AI and robots to speed up drug discovery.

The startup, called Warp Sciences, has raised $215 million in Series A funding. Venture capital firm Lightspeed led the funding round. Other investors include Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux Capital and Menlo Ventures.

Several of Weil’s former colleagues at OpenAI also took part in the funding round. They include Fidji Simo, Mark Chen, Sarah Friar, Srinivas Narayanan, Sebastien Bubeck, Kate Rouch and Bob McGrew.

Other technology leaders who invested 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 investors 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 also has Solomon Reisberg, a former executive at Terremoto Biosciences, as a co-founder. The company is building the systems and facilities needed to help researchers discover new medicines faster.

As part of this work, it plans to set up an advanced preclinical contract research organization (CRO) in the United States. This facility will make and test molecules for companies developing new medicines. Preclinical research takes place before a potential medicine is tested in people.

“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 laboratories could carry out scientific experiments on a very large scale. These experiments would produce 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, who serves as CTO of Warp Sciences, said in a LinkedIn post that the startup would initially focus on improving promising molecules during the development of small-molecule drugs. This process is known as lead optimisation.

“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 first work with experienced chemists on real projects for customers. Over time, it plans to automate more of their work as scientists help develop and test the tools in the laboratory.

Paluri noted that scientists would remain at the centre of the process. They would define the problems, guide the research and decide what counts as success.

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

Paluri studied at IIIT Hyderabad and was one of the co-founders of Facebook AI Research (FAIR). He led Meta’s Llama organisation as part of the company’s AI work. He also helped build Meta’s ability to understand images and videos.

He later served as vice-president of the Media Applied Research organisation within Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL). His team focused on helping AI understand and generate different types of information, including images, videos and other forms of media.

AI giants step up their drug discovery push

Earlier this week, OpenAI acquired Orchestra Bio, a startup developing AI agents to help pharmaceutical companies manage the drug development process. The company behind ChatGPT plans to bring 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. This collection of AI tools is designed to help researchers discover drugs, study biological data and develop treatments through clinical research.

Meanwhile, Isomorphic Labs, a company spun off from Google DeepMind that focuses on using AI to discover drugs, raised $2.1 billion in a funding round led by Thrive Capital in May. This came a year after raising $600 million in its first round of funding from outside investors in March 2025.