Flagship Pioneering’s Lila Sciences has landed a substantial $235 million series A as it looks to exceed the current limits of the drug discovery process through automation.
The round, which more than doubles the AI outfit’s March debut of $200 million, was led by Braidwell and Collective Global, Lila announced in a Sept. 15 blog post. Lila’s other investors include Altitude Life Science Ventures, Alumni Ventures, ARK Venture Fund, Common Metal and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, among others.
Led by Flagship General Partner Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Ph.D., and founded in 2023, Lila’s ambitious goal is to fully automate the scientific method with autonomous research labs powered by a “scientific superintelligence.” The company’s chief scientist is CRISPR pioneer George Church, Ph.D., who is known for taking big swings in biotech—be it “de-extinction” of lost species or transplanting engineered pig organs into humans.
The raise will power an expansion of Lila’s AI Science Factories, where AI models “generate hypotheses, design experiments, run them, learn from the results and iterate” over and over again, von Maltzahn wrote in the blog post. The cash will allow Lila to fund new facilities in Boston, San Francisco and London, according to the post.
“Building a beautiful, superintelligent mind for science requires a new kind of body for science,” von Maltzahn wrote. “Lila’s AI Science Factories are that body—unified facilities where AI, novel software, and custom hardware close the loop between reasoning and real-world verification. Think of them as scientific-method machines.”
Lila claims that its tech has already led to thousands of discoveries in the life sciences, chemistry and materials science, “offering early glimpses of the scientific superintelligence era to come,” von Maltzahn said.
Lila made a similar claim in March, when the company announced it had secured $200 million in seed funding. At the time, Lila said its tech had produced large language models with state-of-the-art scientific reasoning abilities; genetic medicine constructs that perform better than commercially available therapeutics; and hundreds of new antibodies, peptides and binders for a broad range of therapeutic targets.