Warp Sciences nabs $215 million Series A at $865 million valuation led by Lightspeed

Warp Sciences is entering a specific vacuum in US drug discovery: the company says European and American pharma firms send most of their outsourced chemistry work overseas, mainly to China, and no US contract lab of comparable scale exists. The passage of the BIOSECURE Act last December, which restricts federal contracts and grants involving certain concerning biotech firms, adds a policy backdrop that could make domestic alternatives more attractive, though the body does not draw a direct causal link.

The company's model reverses typical CRO billing by charging per delivered compound rather than per person, and by promising no payment if synthesis fails. That shifts synthesis risk onto Warp, which is a meaningful choice for a startup and one that only makes sense if automation can lower the cost of failure over time.

Warp's plan to record every experiment, including failed ones, in a machine-learnable form is central to its pitch. It intends to use that data to train models that predict synthesis methods and which compounds are worth making, with an eventual goal of selling those predictions alongside compounds. Whether the chemist-first, robot-later rollout produces enough consistent data to make such models useful remains to be seen, but the combination of a large capital base and a founder with OpenAI product experience suggests investors see the data flywheel as the real asset.