Medra, a San Francisco-based company developing what it describes as the world’s first platform for Physical AI Scientists, has raised $52 million in a Series A financing to accelerate the development of its autonomous laboratory technology. The round was led by Human Capital, with participation from existing investors Lux Capital, Neo, and NFDG, as well as new investors Catalio Capital Management, Menlo Ventures, 776, Fusion Fund, and others.
The company is focused on transforming drug discovery by integrating artificial intelligence directly with robotic laboratory execution. Medra’s platform autonomously designs, runs, and analyzes experiments end to end, interfacing with standard laboratory tools and instruments while allowing scientists to modify workflows using natural-language instructions. A companion system, Scientific AI, interprets experimental results and collaborates with researchers to refine protocols, enabling a continuous learning loop that connects predictions to real-world outcomes.
Medra was founded to address persistent inefficiencies in pharmaceutical research and development, where bringing a new medicine to market can take more than a decade and require billions of dollars in investment. While AI models can generate predictions at scale, experimental validation remains slow, manual, and fragmented. According to the company, existing approaches typically rely either on rigid industrial automation without adaptive intelligence or on AI-driven software that still depends on manually executed experiments for data generation.
By unifying robotics, AI-driven reasoning, and real-time data feedback into a single system, Medra aims to close the gap between prediction and execution. Each experiment contributes data back into the system, allowing models to improve continuously and enabling research teams to run more experiments, iterate faster, and advance drug candidates with a higher likelihood of success.
The new capital will be used to expand Medra’s platform capabilities, grow its engineering and scientific teams, and scale deployment with biopharma partners. During JPM Week in January 2026, the company plans to host private tours of its San Francisco facility to demonstrate the Physical AI Scientist platform in operation.
Medra is headquartered in San Francisco, California, and positions its technology as a new category within biopharma research, designed to support continuous experimentation across discovery and preclinical development.
KEY QUOTES:
“Pharma runs millions of experiments, but most of that data can’t be reused or fed back into AI. We’re closing that loop by tying predictions to outcomes in a continuous, self-improving cycle. To accelerate drug development, we need to link predictions directly to automated execution and feed the results back into the model. This continuous loop enables drug discovery companies to run far more experiments, iterate faster, and advance therapies with a higher probability of success.”
Michelle Lee, Ph.D., CEO & Founder, Medra
“Medra is creating an entirely new category in biopharma R&D, one where we believe science can continuously learn and scale to create groundbreaking therapeutics with a higher chance of clinical success.”
Armaan Ali, Co-founder, CEO & Managing Partner, Human Capital
“AI models are generating predictions far faster than we can validate them experimentally. Integrating these tools with traditional lab automation is often too rigid to scale effectively. Medra’s Physical AI Scientist bridges this gap using autonomous, general-purpose robotics. The system learns from every experiment, creating the continuous feedback loop needed to scale data generation and drive breakthroughs in frontier science.”
Patrick Hsu, Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley, And Co-founder, Arc Institute
