Investing in Warp: Accelerating the Search for New Medicines

There's a lot of debate these days about what AI will actually do for humanity. We’re seeing extraordinary progress in everything from agents to coding to how entire companies operate. But what if we could use that same technology to cure diseases? What if we could dramatically accelerate the pace of scientific discovery?

That's why we're excited to announce our investment in Warp Sciences, a new company co-founded by Kevin Weil, DJ Patil, Sol Reisberg and Mano Paluri. Warp has raised $215 million in funding led by Lightspeed, with participation from NVIDIA, IVP, Mayfield, Lux, Menlo Ventures, Uncork Capital and others.

I've known Kevin and DJ for nearly two decades, and they're two of the smartest people I've met in Silicon Valley. When they asked us to invest, we jumped at the opportunity.

Warp is reimagining how drug research gets done, building a new generation of chemistry labs here in the United States. By bringing together expert chemists, AI, and robotics, they want to make it possible to run experiments at a scale we've never seen before and generate the data needed to develop AI models that could fundamentally change how we discover and develop new medicines.

Developing a new drug is an incredibly expensive and time-consuming process. Scientists spend years making and testing thousands of different molecules hoping to find one that finally works. When we do find a drug that works, it can be life-changing. But the process of getting there is painfully slow, it's expensive, and filled with failed experiments. This is why new drugs take years to make and cost a fortune.

What a lot of people don't realize is that those failed experiments are actually some of the most valuable data in science, yet much of that information never makes it into the datasets used to train AI. That's a major limitation for today's AI models, which learn from successful outcomes, but not the experimentation that led to them. 

Warp wants to change that. They're building a U.S.-based chemistry lab where expert chemists guide the science, AI helps plan experiments and learn from the results, and robotics increasingly automates the lab work. The goal is to run experiments around the clock, making it possible to make and test far more molecules, much faster and at a lower cost. And with so much of this chemistry work currently outsourced to China, Warp has a huge opportunity to bring it back to the U.S.

This is all an enormous undertaking, and I can’t think of a better team to take it on.

DJ helped shape the modern field of data science and went on to become the first Chief Data Scientist of the United States. Kevin has led product at Twitter, Instagram, and OpenAI, where he most recently served as VP of Science. Sol Reisberg held medicinal chemistry leadership roles at Terremoto Biosciences, and Mano Paluri was a VP at Meta Superintelligence Labs and a founding member of FAIR, Meta’s AI research lab.

This team could do just about anything, and they’ve decided to take on one of the hardest problems in science.

It's an honor to be part of something this ambitious. Congratulations to Kevin, DJ, Sol, Mano and the entire Warp team!