ai-for-science
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Yvonne Chen Is Teaching Biotech to Speak AI
After two decades selling change at AT&T, Google, Facebook, Udemy and Calm, Yvonne Chen has arrived at a harder assignment: making artificial intelligence useful at the laboratory bench.
Rayan Mubarak Is Teaching AI to Carry the Clipboard
At 19, the Enjamb founder has moved from publishing computational-biology research to rebuilding the paperwork around science. His bet is simple: useful AI should do the work, keep the context, and leave people with the decisions that matter.
Geoffrey von Maltzahn
Geoffrey von Maltzahn is the co-founder and CEO of Lila Sciences, a Cambridge company building what it calls scientific superintelligence: AI plus robotic labs that run the scientific method autonomously. A general partner at Flagship Pioneering, he has founded or co-founded a string of companies including Generate:Biomedicines, Tessera Therapeutics, Indigo Agriculture, Sana Biotechnology, Seres Therapeutics and Quotient Therapeutics, which together carry more than $10 billion in market value. He holds a PhD from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and is named on more than 200 patents.
Haojun Jia
Haojun Jia is the co-founder and CEO of Deep Principle, an AI-for-science startup building AI scientists that discover new materials and chemical reactions. He hatched the idea while finishing a physical chemistry PhD at MIT, where his research paired high-throughput quantum chemistry with machine learning to design catalysts. Deep Principle's platform - marketed as ReactiveAI and now the agentic tool Agent Mira - fuses deep learning with first-principles physics to compress the time and cost of materials R&D. The company has raised roughly $28 million across two rounds from investors including GL Ventures, Linear Capital, Vertex Ventures, and funds backed by Lenovo and Baidu. Jia was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2025 list in Healthcare & Science.
Jack Milwid
Jack Milwid is a scientist-turned-company-builder who sits in the Office of the CEO at Lila Sciences, the Flagship Pioneering venture chasing 'scientific superintelligence' through autonomous AI-run laboratories. A materials engineer with a Harvard-MIT PhD, he has spent his career founding biotech companies from scratch - among them Sana Biotechnology, Neon Therapeutics, Cobalt Biomedicine and Kaleido Biosciences - and co-founded the investment firm Related Sciences. His trademark is turning early science into operating companies.
Alexander Lavin
Alexander Lavin is an AI researcher and former rocket scientist who founded Pasteur Labs and the Institute for Simulation Intelligence (ISI) in New York. He is building what he calls 'the IDE for reality' - simulation engines fused with AI that let scientists and engineers run experiments in software before touching the physical world. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and lead author of the landmark 'Simulation Intelligence' paper, Lavin's path runs from lunar rovers and Blue Origin rocket structures through Numenta, Vicarious, and a probabilistic-medicine startup acquired by Johnson & Johnson, to a focused-research mission aimed at Nobel-Turing breakthroughs in energy, climate, and fusion.
Deep Principle
Deep Principle is an AI-for-Science company spun out of MIT that builds ReactiveAI, a closed-loop R&D platform fusing generative AI, quantum chemistry, and high-throughput experimentation to discover new materials, catalysts, and chemical processes far faster and cheaper than traditional trial-and-error labs. Founded by MIT PhDs Haojun Jia and Chenru Duan, the company targets materials, energy, and pharmaceutical R&D and has reported quantum-chemistry speedups on the order of 20,000x versus conventional DFT.
Elicit
Elicit is an Oakland-based AI research platform that automates the slow, manual parts of scientific literature review - searching, screening, and extracting data from papers. Spun out of the nonprofit research lab Ought in 2023, it lets researchers query a corpus of over 125 million papers, run systematic reviews that are traceable and auditable, and extract data from tables and figures with accuracy that rivals expert reviewers. More than two million researchers across academia, biotech, and pharma use it to get evidence-based answers in hours instead of months.
Lila Sciences
Lila Sciences is a Cambridge, Massachusetts company building what it calls scientific superintelligence: an 'AI Science Factory' that fuses generative AI with fully autonomous, robotic laboratories. Its platform generates hypotheses, designs and runs physical experiments, reads the results, and decides what to test next - closing the loop of the scientific method without a human pipetting at every step. Spun out of Flagship Pioneering's labs in 2023 and unveiled from stealth in March 2025, Lila has raised roughly $550 million and reached a valuation around $1.3 billion, with autonomous-science units aimed at life, chemical, and materials science.
Benchling
Benchling is a cloud platform built for biotech R&D - a single, biology-first system of record where scientists design experiments, track samples, manage molecular data, and collaborate. Founded in 2012 out of MIT, it has grown into the operating system for modern life science, used by hundreds of thousands of scientists at companies ranging from startups to the largest biopharma firms, and is now embedding AI agents and predictive models directly into the lab workflow.
Jason Cui
Jason Cui is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) investing at the intersection of foundational AI, developer tooling, and scientific platforms. A Harvard computer science graduate, he co-founded Jemi (acquired by Brat TV in 2023), led product at Databricks, and previously worked at Uber and Hulu. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2021, he joined a16z to back the infrastructure layer of the AI era, with bets like the $150M seed round for Inferact, the next-generation commercial inference engine built by the vLLM maintainers.
Neiman Mathew
Neiman Mathew is a Partner at Greylock, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on early-stage founders building the next generation AI stack. He skipped college to pursue technology, spending years at Hex Labs applying AI to materials discovery and at Schmidt Futures funding ambitious AI-for-science research before joining Amplify Partners and then Greylock. Known for engaging founders before they even have a business idea, Mathew brings a rare combination of deep scientific intuition and investor pattern-recognition to the earliest and most uncertain bets in AI.