🔬 Periodic Labs: a Laboratory with Robot Scientists
San Francisco-based startup Periodic Labs, which aims to automate scientific discoveries, has raised $300 million in seed funding. Investors include a16z, Nvidia, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Periodic Labs was launched by DeepMind former employee Ekin Dogus Cubbuk and former OpenAI researcher Liam Fedus. The startup's scientific advisory board includes professors from Stanford and other top universities.
The company plans to develop AI-powered robot scientists that will autonomously conduct experiments and analyze data in a specially designed laboratory.
"Until now, scientific AI advances have come from models trained on the internet. But despite its vastness—it's still finite. And in recent years the best frontier AI models have fully exhausted it. Autonomous labs provide huge amounts of high-quality data and give our AI scientists the tools to act," the company's founders write.
The first goal of Periodic Labs is to discover superconductors that work at higher temperatures than today's materials. The company believes that automating materials design will accelerate the development of electronics and bring space travel and nuclear fusion closer to reality.
