Kevin Weil, who led OpenAI for Science, has launched Warp Sciences with $215M to build an automated drug development lab in the US.
Lightspeed led the round, which values the company at $865M, Bloomberg reported. The lab will handle one step in drug development that pharma companies have long outsourced to Chinese firms such as WuXi AppTec. The company has not publicly specified which step.
The target is what makes this notable. Many AI-for-science pitches sell software, such as a model that proposes molecules or sifts through research papers. Warp is going after physical work instead: a stage of drug development that drug makers have typically paid outside companies to run. For a former AI lab executive, that is a bet on lab equipment as much as on models.
It also puts a US-based option next to a supply chain that has leaned on Chinese providers. Warp is not the first startup to promise a smarter way to make medicines, but it is aiming at a specific, established service rather than at drug discovery in general.
The $865M valuation rests on a lab that is still being built. The test is whether pharma companies, which have long sent this work to established Chinese providers, will send it to a new facility in the US.