Warp Sciences plans to create chemistry infrastructure for sovereign biotech. Source: deni AI, Adobe Stock

Warp Sciences last week emerged from stealth with $215 million in funding to create infrastructure that enables biotech and pharmaceutical companies to discover new medicines faster. The startup said it is building a U.S.-based chemistry contract research organization, or CRO, to bring together chemists, robotics, and AI to make and test molecules for research teams.

The South San Francisco-based company‘s stated goal is to provide experimental data to train better AI that in turn enables more capable labs, giving scientists the ability to test more ideas.

“AI has dramatically accelerated software engineering and mathematics, but it has yet to make the same impact in the physical sciences,” stated Kevin Weil, co-founder and CEO of Warp Sciences. “Chemistry and biology move forward when you make something, test it and learn from the result.”

“If we want to build more capable AI for science, we need to generate real-world data at scale,” he added. “Warp is starting that process by making the research compounds drug discovery needs today, while building the labs and automation to speed the cycle from hypothesis to experiment to answer.”

Warp said it has no proprietary drug pipeline itself; it is designing automated labs that can run experiments, learn from them, and improve with each cycle.

A promising molecular design is only the beginning, observed Warp Sciences. “Scientists have to make it, test it, and use what they learn to decide what comes next,” said the company.

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