AI startup Lila Sciences just propelled its valuation to over a billion dollars after its latest funding round. Lila Sciences told Reuters that it has raised $115 million in an extension funding round from investors including Nvidia’s venture arm, lifting its valuation to more than $1.3 billion.
The latest funding brings Lila’s total Series A to $350 million and overall capital raised to $550 million, reflecting strong investor appetite for AI-driven scientific discovery.
Lila Sciences is an artificial intelligence startup launched in 2023 by Flagship Pioneering with the ambitious goal of creating “scientific superintelligence.” The company integrates advanced AI with autonomous lab systems and robotics to accelerate scientific discovery across fields like materials science, chemistry, and life sciences.
At the core of its approach are AI Science Factories, highly automated research environments designed to independently generate hypotheses, design and execute experiments, and rapidly learn from the results. By building its own proprietary experimental data sets rather than relying solely on historical literature or databases, Lila aims to close the loop between digital reasoning and physical experimentation.
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The company’s platform is being positioned to serve sectors such as green energy, drug development, carbon capture, and semiconductors.
“What’s so exciting about Lila is that we’re going to use those resources very productively in a way that I feel benefits almost everyone on the planet,” said co-founder and CEO Geoffrey von Maltzahn in an interview.
“It will set in motion the scientific method in a new form,” he said. The company claims its platform has already made thousands of discoveries across life sciences, chemistry and materials.
“We aren’t going to bring molecules into clinical trials ourselves, or scale up new energy breakthroughs,” von Maltzahn said. “Those are going to be done by partners of Lila and startups that are on a Lila platform.”
This level of support underscores growing interest in AI-driven research infrastructure, particularly as industries seek faster, more scalable ways to discover new drugs, materials, and sustainable technologies. While still in its early stages, Lila’s approach could enable other companies and startups to commercialize breakthroughs developed on its platform.
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However, much of the company’s long-term success will depend on how effectively it can partner with researchers and industry players to apply its discoveries in real-world contexts. If successful, Lila could mark a significant turning point — not just in accelerating science, but in reshaping how science is done altogether. As the platform matures, the broader scientific and industrial impact will come into sharper focus, potentially defining a new era of machine-augmented discovery.
As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply integrated into core scientific processes, Lila Sciences stands at the forefront of a broader shift in research methodology. Its model of combining computational intelligence with physical experimentation could dramatically reduce the trial-and-error cycles that traditionally slow scientific progress.
By enabling machines to not only analyze data but also perform and refine experiments, Lila is helping to bridge the gap between digital simulation and real-world discovery. While the scale of its long-term impact remains to be seen, the company’s approach signals a future where science is not just accelerated by AI, but actively shaped by it.