Kevin Weil, former product officer of OpenAI, is seeking a valuation of at least $750 million for a new AI science startup. He is planning to raise at least $150 million in its funding round.
A report by Business Insider mentioned that the fundraising is a broader sign that AI’s next frontier is shifting from chatbots to science.
Weil left OpenAI last year. He oversaw Prism, a workspace designed to bring frontier models directly into scientists’ workflows. Before OpenAI, Weil held various board seats, including on the boards of Cisco and Stoke Space. While further details about the startup haven’t been revealed, TechCrunch reports Weil has pitched it as a way to gather scientific data for AI models.
READ: OpenAI head of ethics Chloé Bakalar departs after brief tenure (August 11, 2026)
Last month, Weil had joined the board of directors at Stoke Space, adding another high-profile technology leader to the reusable rocket startup as it prepares for the first launch of its Nova rocket. Stoke Space, a Seattle-based aerospace company developing fully reusable launch vehicles, announced Weil’s appointment on Tuesday. The company said his experience in scaling technology businesses and AI products would help guide Stoke as it moves from development into commercial operations.
Founded in 2019 by former Blue Origin engineers Andy Lapsa and Tom Feldman, Stoke Space has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, and the U.S. government. The company has positioned itself as a potential competitor to SpaceX.
READ: OpenAI files a motion to dismiss Apple lawsuit (August 6, 2026)
Weil had announced earlier this year that he is leaving OpenAI. “It’s been a mind-expanding two years, from Chief Product Officer to joining the research team and starting OpenAI for Science,” Weil wrote. “Accelerating science will be one of the most stunningly positive outcomes of our push to AGI.” The departure came after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery.
Around the same time as Weil’s departure, Bill Peebles, the researcher behind AI video tool Sora, also decided to leave. In the post announcing his departure, Peebles credited Sora with igniting a “huge amount of investment in video across the industry,” and argued that the kind of research that produced the video tool requires space away from the company’s mainline roadmap.
OpenAI also lost Srinivas Narayanan who was its chief technology officer of enterprise applications. Narayanan reportedly announced the news internally that he was leaving to spend more time with family.