Kevin Weil, former Chief Product Officer and head of science initiatives at OpenAI, is stepping back into the spotlight this time not with a chatbot, but with a laboratory. On October 22, Warp Sciences emerged from stealth with $215 million in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, at a post-money valuation of $865 million. The round included participation from IVP, Mayfield, Lux Capital, Premji Invest, and Menlo Ventures, alongside a lengthy list of angel investors including former OpenAI executive Sarah Friar, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
The pitch is deceptively simple: American biotech has outsourced too much of its chemistry. In a 2024 survey by the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, 74% of responding biotech companies reported contracts with Chinese firms for preclinical and clinical services. That reliance became a policy flashpoint.
The BIOSECURE Act, signed into law in December 2025 as part of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act, established restrictions on federal procurement involving designated “biotechnology companies of concern” though those restrictions will take effect in phases only after regulatory rulemaking is completed, a process that could stretch to 2028. Warp’s launch comes amid that shift, betting that a domestic alternative one built around AI and robotics from day one can offer the speed and cost of overseas partners without the intellectual-property anxieties or geopolitical exposure.
Warp is not developing its own drugs. Instead, it is building a U.S.-based contract research organization (CRO) focused initially on lead optimization analog synthesis
The labor-intensive process of making hundreds of variations of a promising molecule so researchers can compare them and inch toward a drug candidate. Experienced chemists will guide the work while wearing cameras and sensor-equipped gloves, training robots to gradually take over repetitive lab tasks. The data generated by those physical experiments feeds back into Warp’s AI models, creating a loop the company describes as “every experiment should make the next one smarter.”
Weil’s co-founders bring complementary resumes. Solomon “Sol” Reisberg, chief scientific officer, held medicinal chemistry leadership roles at Terremoto Biosciences and has spoken directly to the pain point Warp is targeting: “I’ve worked with overseas chemistry partners that delivered speed and value, but I still worried about protecting the intellectual property behind our programs.” Manohar “Mano” Paluri, CTO, was a founding member of Meta’s FAIR lab and a vice president at Meta Superintelligence Labs. DJ Patil, COO, was the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist under the Obama administration and a founding executive at Devoted Health.
The timing reflects a broader shift in U.S. deep-tech investing. Lightspeed’s investment thesis notes that the largest offshore chemistry providers have a combined market cap near $100 billion, and that U.S. companies could take up to eight years to replace them without disrupting drug programs. Warp’s ambition is to compress that timeline by making automation and data capture intrinsic to the lab, rather than bolted on later. For Weil, who spent years at OpenAI working on AI’s application to science, the bet is that physical-world data not just more compute is the missing ingredient. “AI has dramatically accelerated software engineering and mathematics, but it has yet to make the same impact in the physical sciences,” he said in a statement.
With roughly $215 million and a founding team that spans OpenAI, Meta, the White House, and Big Pharma, Warp Sciences now faces the unglamorous work of proving that a domestic, AI-native CRO can actually deliver. If it can, the company won’t just be a startup story it will be a supply-chain story, a policy story, and, potentially, a template for how American deep tech rebuilds the infrastructure it once sent overseas.
