Kevin Weil's Warp Sciences raises $215 million to build robotic chemistry labs in the US

Kevin Weil, formerly chief product officer and VP of science at OpenAI, launched Warp Sciences on Oct. 22 with a $215 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round values the company at $865 million, TechCrunch reported, citing Weil. Co-founders include DJ Patil, the first US chief data scientist, and Meta FAIR co-founder Manohar Paluri.

On day one, Warp is a contract lab staffed by chemists. Weil describes a "next-generation preclinical CRO" in America that makes and tests molecules for drug developers and develops no drugs of its own, starting with "real chemists doing real work for real customers" and automating that work over time. Chemists wearing cameras and sensor gloves will train the robots, TechCrunch reported. The money is a bet that robots can make US lab work cheap enough to win back chemistry that drugmakers now send to China, with the robots arriving after the customers.

Lightspeed's case for the timing rests on policy. Weil notes that WuXi was added in June to the Department of War's list of Chinese military companies; Lightspeed says the BIOSECURE Act became law in December 2025 and that US companies could take up to eight years to replace such partners.

The comparison Lightspeed offers is a University of Liverpool mobile robot chemist that ran 688 experiments over eight days, working 172 of the 192 hours. A chemist doing synthesis by hand rarely runs more than about ten reactions a day.