autonomous-lab
(2)
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.