Lila Sciences is a privately held company building what it describes as the world’s first scientific superintelligence — a platform pairing AI with fully autonomous laboratories across the life, chemical, and materials sciences. It was founded inside Flagship Pioneering’s labs in 2023 and publicly unveiled in March 2025. Its stated aim is to compress the experimental cycle, with AI generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and interpreting results rather than only analyzing data produced by human researchers. The company launched with $200 million in committed seed capital from Flagship Pioneering, 📝General Catalyst, 📝March Capital, ARK Venture Fund, and a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, later closing a $350 million 📝Series A that brought total funding to roughly $550 million. Its central construct is the AI Science Factory (AISF™), an autonomous workflow intended to run experiments continuously and at a scale human labs cannot match. Coverage of the company, including a March 2025 New York Times profile, has framed the “scientific superintelligence” claim as ambitious and, as yet, unproven — the platform’s output is measured in future discoveries, not shipped products.
It's kind of surreal that Lila is where 📝Brendan Weafer — one of our investors — is currently posted. The mission is ambitious in a way that feels aligned with how we think about augmenting human systems through intelligence and automation, and it's a reminder of how tightly woven our network is becoming.