Warp Sciences Raises $215M Series A Led by Lightspeed to Automate Preclinical Drug Development | VeilStrat

Warp Sciences Secures $215M Series A

Warp Sciences, a US-based startup applying AI and robotics to drug development, has raised a $215 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The funding was announced on October 22, 2026.

What Warp Sciences Does

Warp Sciences operates a next-generation preclinical contract research organization (CRO). Rather than developing its own drugs, the company makes and tests molecules for other drug developers. It is building fully automated robotic labs in the United States where chemists, AI-designed experiments, and robotic execution generate proprietary data to train scientific AI models.

The company was founded by Kevin Weil, DJ Patil, Manohar Paluri, and Solomon Reisberg.

Strategic Positioning

Warp Sciences aims to reshore preclinical chemistry work that pharmaceutical companies have long outsourced to Chinese contract manufacturers such as WuXi AppTec. By combining automated robotic labs with AI-driven experiment design, the company seeks to generate proprietary data that can improve its scientific models over time.

The Investor Syndicate

The Series A was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and includes a broad syndicate of investors:

Mayfield
Lux Capital
Kearny Jackson
Gigascale Capital
Bob McGrew
Lowercarbon Capital
Lachy Groom
Premji Invest
Shyam Sankar
Westbound
Formus Capital
01 Advisors
SignalFire
Reid Hoffman
Dylan Field
Fidji Simo
IVP
500 Global
Fifth Down Capital
Matter Venture Partners
Brian Armstrong
Conviction
Mike Krieger
Angular Ventures
Friends & Family Capital
Menlo Ventures
Chapter One
Moxxie Ventures
Liquid 2 Ventures
Uncork Capital
Innovation Endeavors
Scribble Ventures
Ion Stoica
Avenir Group
Sarah Friar
Brendan Foody
Standard VC
Milan Kovac
Zero Shot Fund
Mark Chen
Lulu Cheng Meservey
Kate Rouch
Deepak Pathak
Sebastien Bubeck
Parag Agrawal

Acquisition Relevance

The round provides Warp Sciences with substantial capital to build out its automated robotic lab infrastructure and scale its preclinical CRO offering. For acquirers, the company represents a combination of AI model development, robotics, and contract research capabilities in a single platform. Its focus on reshoring preclinical chemistry work positions it at the intersection of drug development services and domestic manufacturing capacity.

The size of the Series A and the breadth of the investor base—spanning venture firms, strategic operators, and individual technologists—signal strong conviction in the company's approach to generating proprietary scientific data through automated experimentation.