Ex-OpenAI Science Head Kevin Weil Launches Warp Sciences With $215M

Warp Sciences is launching out of stealth with $215M in funding at an $865M post-money valuation, led by former OpenAI VP for Science Kevin Weil alongside co-founders Manohar Paluri, DJ Patil, and Solomon Reisberg. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from IVP, Premji Invest, and Lux Capital, plus angel investors including OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, former OpenAI executive Fidji Simo, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, and Reid Hoffman. Rather than discovering new drugs, Warp targets the labor-intensive generation of hundreds or thousands of molecule variants—a process US pharmaceutical firms have historically outsourced to Chinese contractors like WuXi AppTec. Starting with a team of about 20 people, Warp is accumulating robotic arms and AI chips to build an automated laboratory where chemists wear cameras and pressure-sensor gloves during experiments to generate proprietary training data. The launch expands the push into AI-driven life sciences, following OpenAI's recent acquisition of Orchestra Bio and earlier work where OpenAI agents analyzed mouse brain data in 32 minutes. "It's still an area where frontier AI models are not yet changing the world in the way models are changing the world in software engineering and math. That’s because the field is so much more experimentally driven. The models need to see that data." — Kevin Weil