ai-scientist
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Medra
Medra builds Physical AI Scientists - robots that run biology experiments end to end. Its platform pairs a reasoning layer that designs and interprets experiments with vision-guided robots that pipette, culture cells, edit genes and log every step, all directed in plain English. Founded by Stanford robotics PhD Michelle Lee, Medra deploys workcells at biopharma partners including Genentech and Addition Therapeutics and is building one of the largest autonomous labs in the United States.
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.
Edison Scientific
Edison Scientific is a San Francisco AI company building autonomous 'AI scientists' that can run hundreds of research tasks in parallel. Spun out of the nonprofit FutureHouse in 2025, its flagship product Kosmos compresses what researchers call six months of work into a single day, reading 1,500 papers and writing 42,000 lines of analysis code per run. The company raised $70M in seed funding at a $250M valuation in December 2025.
Samuel Rodriques
Samuel Rodriques is a physicist-turned-bioengineer and co-founder and CEO of Edison Scientific, the AI-driven scientific discovery company behind Kosmos - an AI scientist that reportedly condenses six months of PhD-level research into a single day. A MIT PhD and Hertz Fellow who invented implosion fabrication and pioneered spatial transcriptomics, Rodriques left the Francis Crick Institute to co-found FutureHouse (funded by Eric Schmidt) in 2023, then spun it into for-profit Edison Scientific, which raised a $70M seed round at a $250M valuation in December 2025. Named to Time 100 AI in 2025, he is on a mission to cure all diseases by mid-century through AI-accelerated science.