Manohar Paluri, an Indian American technology executive who spent 14 years at Meta, has left the company to co-found Warp Sciences, a startup using artificial intelligence and robotics to accelerate drug discovery.
The San Francisco Bay Area-based venture announced $215 million in Series A funding on Oct. 22, led by venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Investors include IVP, Mayfield, Lux Capital, Premji Invest and Menlo Ventures, along with technology executives including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong and Figma co-founder Dylan Field, according to the company’s funding announcement and published reports.
Warp Sciences is building U.S.-based laboratory infrastructure that combines artificial intelligence, robotics and chemistry to help pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies make and test molecules.
Its approach is designed to generate experimental data that can inform future research and help AI systems improve their performance.
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Paluri is a co-founder and chief technology officer of the company and other co-founders include CEO Kevin Weil, a former OpenAI chief product officer; COO DJ Patil, the first U.S. chief data scientist; and Solomon Reisberg, a former Terremoto Biosciences executive.
Paluri joined Facebook, now Meta, in 2012 as a computer vision researcher. He then became director of artificial intelligence in 2015, senior director in 2021 and vice president in 2024.
During his tenure, he helped establish Facebook AI Research and contributed to the development of image- and video-understanding capabilities.
He also held leadership roles involving Meta’s Llama organization and Media Applied Research within Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Paluri announced his departure from Meta in September, stating that he was leaving after 14 years at the company, and later joined the founding team of Warp Sciences.
Warp Sciences plans to begin with lead optimization in small-molecule drug discovery, which involves the process of making and evaluating variations of promising compounds to help researchers determine which candidates merit further development.
The company intends to combine experienced chemists with AI tools and robotic laboratory equipment.
Initially, scientists will work on customer projects and help develop and validate the technology as laboratory workflows become increasingly automated.
Paluri said in a LinkedIn post that the company wants to integrate software, AI and robotics into the experimental process, with each experiment informing subsequent work.
READ: US to spend $5 billion on AI research to speed drug discovery, Trump administration says (July 22, 2026)
Warp Sciences also plans to establish a preclinical contract research organization that will make and test molecules for pharmaceutical and biotechnology customers.
The company says it will provide research infrastructure rather than develop its own drugs, and the customers will choose which molecules to pursue and retain control of their drug development programs.
Weil has said that AI has advanced software engineering and mathematics has yet to make a comparable impact in the physical sciences. Warp Sciences aims to address that gap by generating real-world experimental data at scale.
The company’s model puts laboratory work at the center of its AI strategy: researchers identify the questions, AI helps design experiments, and robotic systems carry out the work. The resulting data can then inform future experiments.
With its new funding, Warp Sciences plans to build scientific research capacity in the United States and help drug developers conduct chemistry experiments more efficiently.