Warp Sciences raises $215M led by Lightspeed to build robotic chemistry labs in the US

Warp Sciences, founded by former OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil, said in a press release on Oct 22 that it has come out of stealth with $215 million to build a US chemistry contract research organization that combines medicinal chemists, AI and lab robots.

Lightspeed, which said in its own investor post that it led the Series A, was joined by Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux, Menlo Ventures and 13 other firms; Bloomberg reported a post-money valuation of $865 million, a figure the company has not published.

The first service is lead-optimization analog synthesis at milligram to multi-gram scale, billed per compound delivered, with chemists running the lab while robots take over repetitive steps such as reaction setup and purification and every run, failures included, is logged as training data.

The co-founders are Weil (CEO), Sol Reisberg (CSO), DJ Patil (COO) and Manohar Paluri (CTO, formerly of Meta Superintelligence Labs), and the company says early hires came from robotics firms Genesis, Skild AI and 1X.

MEKAWIRE context: angels include Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak and Physical Intelligence co-founder Lachy Groom, and in our funding data Lightspeed also backed Skild AI's $300 million Series A in 2024 and RobCo's $100 million Series C in January; Warp's opening round is about twice the $105 million launch round Genesis AI disclosed in 2025.