# Michelle Lee

> Michelle Lee is the founder and CEO of Medra, a San Francisco company building 'Physical AI Scientists' - robot arms with cameras and sensors, governed by AI, that run wet-lab biology experiments around the clock. A Stanford AI Lab PhD who worked at NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey, she walked away from an assistant professor post at NYU after AlphaFold 2's 2021 release convinced her that biology's real bottleneck was not algorithms but data, and that data is a robotics problem. Medra runs in production with partners including Genentech and raised a $52M Series A in December 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $63M.

- **Role:** Founder & CEO at Medra
- **Organizations:** Medra, New York University, NVIDIA, SpaceX, McKinsey & Company, Stanford AI Lab
- **Education:** PhD - robotics, Physical AI, reinforcement learning, machine learning, perception, autonomous systems, Stanford University (Stanford AI Lab)
- **Known for:** Founded Medra and built the first end-to-end Physical AI Scientist platform for drug discovery, Raised a $52M Series A (Dec 2025), bringing total funding to roughly $63M, Built Medra Lab 001 - a 38,000 sq ft facility - in under 90 days, designed for hundreds of 24/7 robots

## Career timeline

- **pre-2021** — Researcher and engineer across NVIDIA, SpaceX, and McKinsey & Company; PhD at the Stanford AI Lab
- **2021** — AlphaFold 2's release reframes her thinking - she gets excited about AI that predicts protein function, not just folding
- **2021-2022** — Serves as assistant professor of computer science and electrical & computer engineering at NYU
- **2022** — Leaves her NYU faculty position to found Medra
- **2025-09** — Medra emerges from stealth and launches publicly
- **2025-12** — Medra raises a $52M Series A led by Human Capital; announces Genentech partnership and Medra Lab 001

## Achievements

- Founded Medra and built the first end-to-end Physical AI Scientist platform for drug discovery
- Raised a $52M Series A (Dec 2025), bringing total funding to roughly $63M
- Built Medra Lab 001 - a 38,000 sq ft facility - in under 90 days, designed for hundreds of 24/7 robots
- Medra's Vision-Language-Lab-Action model learned to operate over 75% of the instruments scientists already use
- Signed production partnerships including Genentech (a Roche subsidiary) across antibody discovery, protein engineering, gene editing, genomics, and cell biology
- Left a tenure-track faculty post at NYU to pursue the company full time

## Latest updates

- **2025-12** — Medra raised a $52M Series A led by Human Capital and announced a Genentech partnership plus Medra Lab 001.
- **2025-09** — Medra publicly launched out of stealth.

## Links

- Website: https://www.medra.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amichlee/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/michellearning
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_R_kP8xIew

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/michelle-lee
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-22