Bioplatform innovation company Flagship Pioneering has unveiled Lila Sciences, a company building the world’s first scientific superintelligence platform and fully autonomous labs for life, chemical, and materials sciences. Lila raised $200 million in committed seed capital from Flagship Pioneering, along with General Catalyst, March Capital, ARK Venture Fund, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Blue Horizon Advisors, State of Michigan Retirement System, Modi Ventures and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) to support the further development of the AI platform, autonomous labs, and infrastructure for rapid scaling.
Lila, founded in Flagship’s labs in 2023, is pioneering an advanced form of AI that can not only process vast amounts of data and make predictions but also assist scientists in designing and conducting new experiments, generating hypotheses, and testing them in real-world environments.
Lila’s Autonomous Science platform was designed to scale and optimize experimentation in any scientific domain by combining generative AI with generalizable, scalable, and autonomous AI science units. In just a few years of development, the platform has demonstrated performance in multiple domains that exceed human and existing AI-powered benchmarks, including:
– LLMs with state-of-the-art reasoning capabilities on critical scientific problems and scientific intelligence benchmarks;
– Generation of optimal genetic medicine constructs that outperform commercially available therapeutics;
– Discovery and validation of hundreds of novel antibodies, peptides, and binders for a broad range of therapeutic targets;
– Generation of unique non-platinum group metals as catalysts in the production of green hydrogen at a fraction of the cost of current commercial catalysts; and
– Design of new material for industrial-scale carbon capture with better capacity, thermal stability, and kinetic binding than leading products.
Lila’s platform will be open to partners across the life and material sciences industries to jointly develop solutions in human health and sustainability at a pace and scale beyond today’s limits.
Lila is headed by a team that brings depth and breadth of expertise across diverse fields, including AI, security, commercial strategy, organizational effectiveness, robotics, and scientific fields spanning biology, chemistry, and materials science. Renowned geneticist George Church, Ph.D., will be Chief Scientist. Andrew Beam, Ph.D., serves as the company’s CTO, building a leading AI research team that includes Kenneth Stanley, Ph.D., who joins as a Senior Vice President. Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, Ph.D., is joining the company as CSO of Materials. Christopher Fussell, an author and expert in cross-functional collaboration, serves as the company’s President of Operations.
KEY QUOTES:
“Lila’s mission to responsibly achieve Scientific Superintelligence is born out of the belief that this is the most important opportunity of our time, and that the leader in this pursuit will be the entity that runs the scientific method at the largest scale, speed and intelligence. To achieve this, we must solve the hard problems to allow AI to autonomously and in a scalable manner run each step – from AI models generating an idea to reducing it to practice with robotics and automation. We’ve made some incredible progress in only a few years and are at the very beginning of this important mission.”
– Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lila Sciences and General Partner, Flagship Pioneering
“For all of human history, the method for scientific exploration has been steadfast: we predict, test, learn, create. Yet for all the progress we have made, we still understand only a fraction of the rules that govern the physical world. With Lila, our hypothesis is that by scaling experimentation, we can unlock emergent abilities and enable discoveries that remain hidden at smaller scales. Lila represents an ambitious undertaking that we believe will accelerate science with enormous benefit to society.”
– Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman, Lila Sciences
“AI has already transformed our ability to uncover new insights from existing data. We believe the next frontier in scientific discovery will come from enabling AI to design and run experiments at unprecedented scale. This requires software and hardware innovation in the lab such that, with each iteration of the scientific method, AI systems can orchestrate thousands of experiments simultaneously, systematically building our understanding and accelerating scientific progress. This approach has the potential to advance research across many scientific domains, from healthcare and drug development to agriculture and sustainable resources, and to create resiliency in our domestic R&D efforts.”
– Molly Gibson, Ph.D., Co-Founder and President, Future Science at Lila Sciences and Origination Partner, Flagship Pioneering
