ai-for-science
(4)
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.