Periodic Labs came out of stealth on Tuesday with a war chest of $300 million as a seed round, backed by a tech industry who’s who: Andreessen Horowitz, DST, Nvidia, Accel, Elad Gil, Jeff Dean, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos.
Periodic Labs was founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus. Cubuk led the materials and chemistry team at Google Brain and DeepMind, where one of his projects was, for instance, an AI tool called GNoME. That tool discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023, materials that could one day be used to power new generations of technology, researchers say.
Fedus is a former VP of Research at OpenAI, and one of the researchers who helped create ChatGPT. He also led the team that created the first trillion-parameter neural network.
Its small team is likewise filled with researchers who have worked on other major AI and materials science projects, from building OpenAI’s agent Operator to working on Microsoft’s MatterGen, an LLM materials science discovery AI.
The goal of Periodic Labs is nothing less than to automate scientific discovery, creating AI scientists, the company says. This means building labs where robots conduct physical experiments, collect data, iterate, and try again, learning and improving as they go.
