en.Wedoany.com Reported - Periodic Labs is in talks for a new funding round, aiming to close at a valuation of $7.5 billion, led by AMP (an investment vehicle founded by former Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anjney Midha). The round is reportedly at least $500 million in size.
One of the sources said the round was "significantly oversubscribed," and there are already discussions about an additional supplementary round at a higher valuation. Periodic Labs did not respond to requests for comment, and AMP declined to comment.
The San Francisco-based startup was founded last September, closing a $300 million seed round at a $1.3 billion valuation. If this round closes at a $7.5 billion valuation, Periodic Labs (which made its debut on the Forbes AI 50 Brink list this year) will have seen its valuation increase nearly sixfold in less than eight months. Bloomberg reported in March that the company was in talks for a massive funding round valued at least $7 billion.
Periodic Labs was co-founded by Liam Fedus, former Vice President of Research at OpenAI, and Ekin Dogus Cubuk, former Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. According to the company's website, it is developing autonomous robotic laboratories to conduct experiments and create custom data for its AI models. By carrying out thousands of physical and chemical experiments, Periodic Labs hopes to rapidly iterate and discover new materials.
Currently, the company is searching for new superconducting materials that operate at higher temperatures and is collaborating with the semiconductor industry, using its "AI scientist" for research and development. This vision has attracted top talent—according to a New York Times report last year, Periodic Labs has hired more than 20 researchers from Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind, with many giving up substantial equity incentives to join.
For many of the world's top AI researchers, the "holy grail" of artificial intelligence is not a more conversational chatbot, but a tool capable of autonomous scientific discovery. This vision is a pillar of OpenAI's long-term mission; the company's CEO Sam Altman told Forbes earlier this year: "If I could wave a magic wand to redistribute society's wealth, I would pour massive resources into science funding." Similarly, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis has long argued that the goal is to solve intelligence and then use it to "solve everything else," citing AlphaFold's breakthrough in protein folding—which earned him the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry—as just the beginning.
