Ex-OpenAI chief Kevin Weil raises $215 million to bring drug chemistry back to the US

Warp Sciences, a startup led by former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil, emerged from stealth on October 22 with $215 million. Lightspeed led the round. The company is building a US chemistry lab that combines chemists, AI and robotics.

A contract lab with no drugs of its own

According to the company’s press release, Warp is a US-based chemistry contract research organization. It makes and tests the molecules that drug research teams need. Its first service is lead optimization analog synthesis, meaning the production of many variations of a molecule so scientists can compare them while searching for a drug candidate.

Warp says it has no proprietary drug pipeline. Customers pick the molecules and keep control of their programs. Co-founder DJ Patil put it this way: “We’re not developing drugs of our own.” The company also says it aims to offer intellectual property protection and to avoid the price premium it says US boutique contract labs charge.

Experienced chemists will guide the experiments while the lab becomes more automated, and AI models will be trained on data from physical experiments. Bloomberg reported a post-money valuation of $865 million; TechCrunch, citing Weil’s announcement on X, gave the same figure.

The team and the investors behind it

Weil is co-founder and CEO and was previously OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer and VP of Science. Solomon Reisberg, formerly in medicinal chemistry leadership at Terremoto Biosciences, is Chief Scientific Officer. Manohar Paluri, a former vice president at Meta Superintelligence Labs, is CTO. Patil, the first US Chief Data Scientist at the White House, is COO.

Beyond Lightspeed, the investor list includes Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux, Menlo Ventures and SignalFire, among others. Angel investors named by the company include Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Anthropic Labs co-lead Mike Krieger, and two current OpenAI executives, Chief Research Officer Mark Chen and CFO Sarah Friar. Early hires come from robotics companies Genesis, Skild AI and 1X, and from Genentech and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Who it affects in practice: Biotech buyers and their China exposure

The pitch is aimed at drug teams that now send synthesis work abroad. TechCrunch notes that biotech companies have long outsourced the labor-intensive making of molecule variants to contractors in China, such as WuXi AppTec, and that Weil hopes Warp can bring that work home and shield drug development from geopolitical supply-chain risk. Warp’s release cites a 2024 Biotechnology Innovation Organization survey, as reported by Reuters, in which 74% of respondents had contracts with Chinese companies for preclinical and clinical services. It also points to the BIOSECURE Act, signed into law in December 2025, which created a framework for restricting federal procurement and funding involving designated biotechnology companies of concern.

For a small biotech, the practical question is whether a US lab can match the price and turnaround of established overseas providers. Warp says it will undercut US boutique labs on price, and TechCrunch reports the robots are meant to run around the clock. Neither claim has been independently tested.

The funding also fits a pattern of money flowing into AI companies that touch physical operations, such as Tractian’s push into predicting machine failures. Warp is applying the idea to the lab bench rather than the factory floor.

What the announcement leaves open

The release gives no launch date for the service, no lab location, no customer list and no pricing. Everything about speed, cost and robot capability is the company’s own claim. The scale of the robotics side is also unclear: the release says only that the lab will become more automated over time under chemists’ guidance. Weil framed the opportunity around AI’s uneven impact so far, saying it has accelerated software engineering and mathematics but not yet had the same effect elsewhere, in the part of his quote the company published. Warp is hiring, according to its careers page at warp.xyz/careers.