Periodic Labs' pitch to use automated laboratories to run thousands of physics and chemistry experiments for its AI models has captured investor attention with a new round valuing it at $7.5 billion.
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Periodic Labs, a startup building an AI scientist that can use automated labs to make discoveries, is in advanced talks to raise at a $7.5 billion valuation in a round led by AMP, an investment vehicle founded by former Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha, three sources familiar with the matter told Forbes.
The round will be at least $500 million, two of the sources said. The round was “significantly oversubscribed” and there are already talks for a fast-follow additional round at even higher valuation, one of the sources said.
Periodic Labs did not respond to a request for comment. AMP declined to comment.
The aggressive fundraise marks a meteoric rise for the San Francisco-based startup, which emerged in September last year with a $300 million seed round at a $1.3 billion valuation. If the current deal closes at the $7.5 billion mark, Periodic Labs, which debuted on the Forbes AI 50 Brink list this year, will see its value increase nearly sixfold in less than eight months.
Bloomberg reported in March that Periodic Labs was in talks for a large funding round with at least a $7 billion valuation.
The company was founded by Liam Fedus, a former vice president of research at OpenAI, and Ekin Dogus Cubuk, a former research scientist at Google’s DeepMind. According to the company’s website, Periodic Labs is developing autonomous robotic laboratories to run experiments to create custom data for its AI models. The San Francisco-based company hopes that by running thousands of physics and chemistry experiments it can quickly iterate to discover new materials. It is currently trying to find new superconductors that work at higher temperatures. The company is also currently working with the semiconductor industry, which utilizes Periodic’s AI scientist for research and development.
This vision has already attracted a significant roster of talent. Periodic Labs has hired more than 20 researchers from Meta, OpenAI and DeepMind, many of whom walked away from substantial equity packages to join the startup, the New York Times reported last year.
For many of the world’s leading AI researchers, the "holy grail" of AI is not a more conversational chatbot, but a tool capable of autonomous scientific discovery. This vision is a cornerstone of OpenAI’s long-term mission; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has frequently described scientific progress as the primary driver of human flourishing. “If I could wave a magic wand and reallocate societal wealth, I’d put so much into funding science,” he told Forbes earlier this year. Similarly, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis has long maintained that the goal is to solve intelligence and then use it to "solve everything else," citing the protein-folding breakthrough of AlphaFold, which won him a Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2024, as just the beginning.
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