Kevin Weil, until recently OpenAI’s chief product officer, has taken the wraps off Warp Sciences with $215M in funding led by Lightspeed. The San Francisco company is not selling a model. It is building a chemistry contract research organization that pairs medicinal chemists with AI planning and robotic synthesis.
A service with an invoice
Warp’s opening product is unglamorous on purpose. It makes analog variations of molecules for preclinical small-molecule programs, producing compounds at milligram to multi-gram scale for designs that typically need five to 15 synthetic steps. Customers pick the molecules and keep their programs; Warp keeps the bench time.
That is the work that slows drug discovery once a promising design exists. Someone still has to make the compound, run the assay and feed the result into the next round.
The team and the thesis
Weil co-founded the company with chief scientific officer Sol Reisberg, a medicinal chemist; chief technology officer Mano Paluri, previously at Meta’s AI research arm; and chief operating officer DJ Patil, the first US chief data scientist. Backers include Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux, Menlo Ventures and Conviction, plus angels from across tech, among them Brian Armstrong, Mike Krieger and Dylan Field.
Their thesis is that domestic chemistry capacity, not compute, is where biotech AI now stalls. If that holds, the winners may look more like laboratories than software companies.
