Warp Sciences (Warp Sciences Inc.) is an American company building a contract research organization (CRO) for drug chemistry. It combines human chemists, artificial intelligence and robotics to make small-molecule compounds for biotech and pharmaceutical research teams.[1][2] The company was co-founded by former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil, its chief executive, together with DJ Patil, Sol Reisberg and Manohar Paluri,[6] and is building its team and laboratory in South San Francisco, California.[4][5] Warp came out of stealth on October 22, 2026, announcing a $215 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners; Bloomberg reported that the round valued the company at $865 million post-money.[6][8][11] Warp says it does not develop drugs of its own. Its first service is analog synthesis for lead optimization, and it plans to use data from its experiments to train AI models and to automate more of its lab work over time, with a stated long-term ambition of "scientific superintelligence."[2][3]

Overview

Field	Detail
Legal name	Warp Sciences Inc. (SEC filing lists WPR Labs Inc. as a previous name)[13]
Incorporated	2026, Delaware[13]
Location	South San Francisco, California (team and lab)[4][5]; the SEC filing gives a principal business address in Portola Valley, California[13]
Founders	Kevin Weil (CEO), DJ Patil (COO), Sol Reisberg (CSO), Manohar Paluri (CTO)[4][6]
Business	Preclinical chemistry CRO; analog synthesis for small-molecule lead optimization[2]
Employees	About 20 at launch (Bloomberg, October 2026)[8][11]
Funding	$215 million Series A (October 2026), led by Lightspeed Venture Partners[6]
Reported valuation	$865 million post-money (Bloomberg, October 2026)[11]
Website	warp.xyz[1]

History

Background

Before starting Warp, Weil was OpenAI's chief product officer and then its vice president of science, leading the OpenAI for Science group; earlier in his career he worked at Twitter, Instagram and the satellite-imaging company Planet.[16] He announced on April 17, 2026 that he was leaving OpenAI, one day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a model aimed at life sciences research and drug discovery. According to his post, OpenAI for Science was being absorbed into "other research teams."[15]

Fundraising in stealth

On August 11, 2026, Business Insider reported that Weil had sought a valuation of at least $750 million for a new AI science startup and was aiming to raise $150 million, citing three people with knowledge of the discussions. The outlet said the details had not been finalized and could change, that the exact nature of the startup could not be learned, and that Weil had pitched it as a way to gather scientific data for AI models.[14]

The company's later Form D filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission describes Warp Sciences Inc. as a Delaware corporation incorporated in 2026 and lists WPR Labs Inc. as a previous name.[13]

Launch

Weil announced the company on X and LinkedIn on October 22, 2026, writing that it had raised "a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America."[6][7] In the LinkedIn version he gave two reasons for building it: robotic labs would let the company do science "at massive scale" while generating data to train AI models for science, and "We need to reshore critical scientific capabilities from China, so we don't lose our pharma industry the way we did solar, drones, and manufacturing." He summarized the plan as "The lab improves the AI, and the AI improves the lab."[7] Bloomberg reported the launch the same day, and the company distributed a press release describing Warp as "a U.S.-based chemistry contract research organization (CRO) that brings expert chemists, AI, and robotics together to make and test the molecules research teams need."[8][12] The company also published a statement of its mission, presented as written by the four founders, on its website.[3]

In a Form D notice filed on October 26, 2026 (signed by Weil as chief executive on October 23), Warp reported an equity offering totaling $218,459,997, of which $194,609,879 had been sold, with 50 investors having already invested and the first sale dated October 16, 2026. The filing lists Weil and Guru Chahal, a partner at Lightspeed, as directors.[13][23]

Business model

Warp describes itself as a chemistry CRO for preclinical small-molecule programs. Its first service is analog synthesis during lead optimization: making variants of a promising molecule so that a customer's scientists can compare them as they narrow in on a drug candidate. The company says it works at milligram to multi-gram scale, typically on elaborated molecules that require 5 to 15 synthetic steps.[2][9]

Patil said that customers determine which molecules to pursue and keep control of their drug programs. "We're not developing drugs of our own. We're building the infrastructure for the people who do," said Patil, the company's chief operating officer.[9][16] Warp's website contrasts its pricing with CROs that charge by the full-time-equivalent employee: "Warp charges per compound delivered, with pricing set in consultation with the customer. If we don't produce it, you don't pay."[2] It markets the service under the heading "Domestic chemistry CRO, offshore pricing," arguing that offshore suppliers can offer lower costs but can mean more exposure of intellectual property and dependence on a single supplier, while domestic boutique CROs offer closer collaboration but often at a much higher price.[2] Reisberg said Warp aims to give drug hunters overseas-caliber chemistry in the U.S. "with IP protection at the center of the relationship, and without the price premium that U.S. boutique CROs currently demand."[16]

As of October 2026 the company said it was working with a small number of design partners, whose chemists work with Warp's chemists week by week on their programs.[2] Weil told RuntimeWire on launch day that "Our early customers are interested in moving their drug discovery work back to the US for commercial, IP, and geopolitical reasons."[18]

Reisberg described the economics in a LinkedIn post at launch. He wrote that "a lead-opt compound runs about $1,000 offshore, and the same work in the US starts with real estate, reagents, and solvents that cost 60-80% more, before anyone even picks up a flask," and that customers "will pay a premium for domestic work, but it's a premium, not a multiple." He presented automation, scale and the value of the resulting data as the way to close that gap.[17]

Technology and data strategy

Warp says it is building labs "designed for automation from day one," in which experienced chemists guide experiments while more of the work is automated, and the data generated is used to build better models and more capable labs.[1] Its mission statement says the labs will record what was tried and what happened, "including the failures," and that alongside customer work Warp will run dedicated experimental campaigns to generate data for its models.[3]

According to Bloomberg's report, as summarized by The Next Web, Warp's team of about 20 had already bought robotic arms and AI chips at launch, and its chemists will wear cameras and pressure-sensing gloves during experiments to create data for training the company's own AI models.[8] TechCrunch similarly reported that the chemists will train robots to perform lab tasks, with the aim of robots that can operate around the clock.[10] Weil told Bloomberg: "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."[8] Paluri, the chief technology officer, said in the launch announcement: "Our goal is simple: every experiment should make the next one smarter."[16]

Warp's careers page describes the AI work as generating synthetic data, building reinforcement learning environments and using the company's experimental data to create "frontier scientific AI models for retrosynthesis, chemical property prediction, and beyond." On October 27, 2026 it listed eight open roles in South San Francisco, covering chemistry, robotics hardware, a contract robot operator, AI agent systems, infrastructure, product engineering, AI training data and post-training.[5]

The founders' statement sets a longer-term goal beyond the CRO business: "Our ambition is scientific superintelligence: AI that works with scientists to reason about the physical world and make discoveries beyond what they can achieve alone." It says the company is starting with drug research "because people need better medicines now."[3] The plan places Warp among companies applying AI to drug discovery and, more broadly, AI for science, though Warp's stated role is to make and test molecules that customers design rather than to discover drugs itself.[3][9]

Reshoring context

The Next Web, summarizing Bloomberg, reported that drugmakers have long sent lead optimization work of this kind to Chinese firms, especially WuXi AppTec, because they are cheaper and faster. It added that in June 2026 the Pentagon put WuXi AppTec on its list of companies it says are linked to China's military, though a judge blocked the move in August, and that Weil told Bloomberg some drugmakers worry about sharing sensitive data with Chinese contractors.[8] SiliconANGLE noted that the BIOSECURE Act, signed into law in December 2025, restricts federal contracts and grants involving designated "biotechnology companies of concern."[9][16]

Founders and team

Name	Role	Background
Kevin Weil	Co-founder, chief executive officer	Former chief product officer and vice president of science at OpenAI; earlier at Twitter, Instagram and Planet[15][16]
DJ Patil	Co-founder, chief operating officer	Named the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist in 2015; later a founding executive at Devoted Health[9][19]
Sol (Solomon) Reisberg	Co-founder, chief scientific officer	Synthetic chemist; Ph.D. at Scripps Research under Phil Baran; led medicinal chemistry work at Terremoto Biosciences[9][20]
Manohar (Mano) Paluri	Co-founder, chief technology officer	Part of the team that started Meta's AI research group (FAIR); later a vice president at Meta Superintelligence Labs[9][6]

DJ Patil was named Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy and Chief Data Scientist in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in February 2015, the first person to hold the chief data scientist title. The White House announcement described "data scientist" as a term he helped coin and noted that he had most recently been vice president of product at RelateIQ.[19] SiliconANGLE describes him as a founding executive at Devoted Health.[9]

Sol Reisberg describes himself as "the chemist on the founding team."[17] He earned his doctorate at Scripps Research in Phil Baran's group; his thesis work included a total synthesis of the natural product tryptorubin A, published in Science in 2020, as well as electrosynthesis methods. Scripps reported in 2021 that he had joined the venture firm Third Rock Ventures as a senior associate.[20][21] SiliconANGLE reported that he previously led medicinal chemistry work at Terremoto Biosciences, and investor SignalFire describes him as a co-founder of Terremoto whose career has also included Gilead and Schrödinger.[9][16]

Manohar Paluri was described by Weil as a co-founder of FAIR, the AI research lab started at Facebook (Meta FAIR), and by SiliconANGLE as part of the team that started Meta's AI research group before he became a vice president at Meta Superintelligence Labs.[6][9] SignalFire says he spent a decade building AI at Meta, including work on the Llama family of models, and most recently led multimodal understanding and generation.[16] His research includes the 2014 video-recognition paper "Learning Spatiotemporal Features with 3D Convolutional Networks" (C3D), written with Du Tran, Lubomir Bourdev, Rob Fergus and Lorenzo Torresani.[22]

Weil's launch post named Brian Spears, whom he credited with helping achieve "Q>1 fusion" at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, as an early team member.[6] SignalFire's investment note said the early team also includes robotics staff from Genesis, Skild AI and 1X, and scientists from Genentech and Lawrence Livermore.[16] Warp's website lists OpenAI, Gilead, Meta, Devoted Health, the White House, Terremoto, Planet Labs, LinkedIn and Twitter among the organizations its founders come from.[1]

Funding

Date	Event	Amount	Valuation	Investors	Source
August 2026	Reported fundraising in stealth	Aiming to raise $150 million	Sought at least $750 million	Not reported	Business Insider, citing three people; terms not final[14]
October 22, 2026	Series A announced	$215 million	$865 million post-money, per Bloomberg	Lightspeed Venture Partners (lead) and others	Company and press reports[6][8][11][12]
October 26, 2026	Form D filed with the SEC	$218,459,997 offering; $194,609,879 sold at filing	Not stated	50 investors had invested	SEC filing[13]

The Next Web, citing Bloomberg, wrote that the $865 million valuation includes the new money, according to the company.[8] According to the company's press release, as published by VC News Daily, the participating firms besides Lightspeed were Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux, Conviction, Menlo Ventures, 01 Advisors, Standard, Lowercarbon Capital, Gigascale Capital, Angular Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Uncork Capital, Innovation Endeavors, Matter VP, Zero Shot Fund, SignalFire and Moxxie Ventures.[12] Weil's LinkedIn announcement additionally named Avenir Group, Liquid 2 Ventures, Westbound, Chapter One, Friends & Family Capital, 500 Global, Kearny Jackson, Formus Capital and Fifth Down Capital.[7]

The angel investors Weil named include Fidji Simo, Mark Chen, Mike Krieger, Brian Armstrong, Lulu Cheng Meservey, Dylan Field, Milan Kovac, Ion Stoica, Brendan Foody, Sarah Friar, Kate Rouch, Deepak Pathak, Sébastien Bubeck, Parag Agrawal, Shyam Sankar, Bob McGrew, Reid Hoffman and Lachy Groom.[7] The company's website also lists former Johnson & Johnson chief executive Alex Gorsky among its angels.[1]

Reception

Business Insider presented Weil's fundraising as a sign that "AI's next frontier is shifting from chatbots to science," pointing to other AI-for-science startups such as Periodic Labs, which is building AI scientists alongside autonomous laboratories, and Discovery Loop, which Google chief scientist Jeff Dean had announced he was leaving to start with three colleagues.[14] The Next Web noted that Weil was the second former OpenAI leader that week to raise a large sum to make things in the U.S., after Bob McGrew's Arda raised $232 million.[8]

Debarghya Das's "The Ultimate Neolab List," a compiled list of new AI companies, included Warp Sciences in October 2026 with a "Borderline" classification, giving the reason: "Raised big and early, but wet-lab/robotics infrastructure led by a product executive."[24]

Reisberg's own launch post was open about the risks. He wrote that "There's a graveyard here: plenty of groups have tried to automate chemistry at scale and failed, and more have looked at the economics and decided not to try," that sourcing reagents, solvents and building blocks at competitive U.S. prices is "a multi-year problem," and that "Margins will be thin for a while." He added: "We're not claiming we'll 'cure all disease,' or that we'll cure even one; our customers will do that."[17]

See also

References

Warp Sciences, "Warp Sciences | AI and robotics for faster drug discovery", company website, accessed October 27, 2026.
Warp Sciences, "Domestic Chemistry CRO for Biotech and Pharma", company website (Working with Warp), accessed October 27, 2026.
Warp Sciences, "What we believe", company website, accessed October 27, 2026.
Warp Sciences, "Meet the Team Behind Warp Sciences", company website, accessed October 27, 2026.
Warp Sciences, "Join Warp Sciences | Careers in Chemistry, Robotics & AI", company website, accessed October 27, 2026.
Kevin Weil, "Introducing Warp Sciences", post on X, October 22, 2026.
Kevin Weil, "Warp Sciences Raises $215M to Bring AI to Medicine Development", LinkedIn post, October 22, 2026.
Ana-Maria Stanciuc, "Ex-OpenAI science head Kevin Weil launches Warp Sciences with $215M", The Next Web, October 22, 2026.
Duncan Riley, "Ex-OpenAI science chief Kevin Weil launches Warp Sciences with $215M for drug chemistry", SiliconANGLE, October 22, 2026.
Marina Temkin, "Former OpenAI science lead launches Warp Science to automate wet labs with robots", TechCrunch, October 22, 2026.
"Former OpenAI Exec Launches Warp Sciences With $215M to Automate Drug Discovery", Drug Development & Delivery, October 22, 2026.
"Warp Sciences Emerges With $215M", VC News Daily, October 22, 2026.
Warp Sciences Inc., "Form D: Notice of Exempt Offering of Securities", U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, filed October 26, 2026.
Katie Roof and Ben Bergman, "Former OpenAI executive Kevin Weil has sought a valuation of at least $750 million for his new AI science startup", Business Insider, August 11, 2026.
Rebecca Bellan, "Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company continues to shed 'side quests'", TechCrunch, April 17, 2026.
SignalFire, "Why we're betting on Warp Sciences to accelerate U.S. drug discovery", SignalFire blog, October 22, 2026.
Solomon Reisberg, "Warp Sciences: Bringing Chemistry Back to the US with AI", LinkedIn post, October 22, 2026.
Morgan Laning, "Exclusive: Kevin Weil says Warp's early customers are interested in moving drug-discovery work back to the U.S.", RuntimeWire, October 22, 2026.
Megan Smith, "The White House Names Dr. DJ Patil as the First U.S. Chief Data Scientist", The White House (archived), February 18, 2015.
Scripps Research, "Solomon Reisberg", Class of 2021 graduate profile, May 7, 2021.
Solomon H. Reisberg, Yang Gao, Allison S. Walker, Eric J. N. Helfrich, Jon Clardy and Phil S. Baran, "Total synthesis reveals atypical atropisomerism in a small-molecule natural product, tryptorubin A", Science, January 24, 2020.
Du Tran, Lubomir Bourdev, Rob Fergus, Lorenzo Torresani and Manohar Paluri, "Learning Spatiotemporal Features with 3D Convolutional Networks", arXiv:1412.0767, December 2, 2014.
Lightspeed Venture Partners, "Guru Chahal", team page, accessed October 27, 2026.
Debarghya Das, "The Ultimate Neolab List", accessed October 27, 2026.

Editing: Warp Sciences