Top OpenAI, Google Brain researchers set off a $300M VC frenzy for their startup Periodic Labs

Summary

Periodic Labs, a new startup by one of OpenAI’s most respected researchers, Liam Fedus, and his former Google Brain colleague, Ekin Dogus Cubuk, came out of stealth last month with an enormous $300 million seed round. It was led by Felicis and included a who’s who of angels and other top VCs. The startup began when Fedus had a conversation with Cubuk (whose friends call him “Doge”) about seven months ago. Cubuk was one of Google Brain’s foremost machine learning and material science researchers. After endless Silicon Valley takes on how GenAI would radically change scientific discovery, they decided that the pieces were finally in place to make this a reality. Or at least to found a startup that attempted it. “There are a few things that happened in the LLM field, in experimental science and in simulations that kind of made this the right time,” Cubuk told TechCrunch. For one, he said, robotic arms that could handle powder synthesis — the process of mixing and creating new materials — had recently proved themselves reliable. For another, machine learning simulations had become efficient and accurate enough to model complex physical systems such as those needed to develop new materials. And, third, LLMs now had powerful reasoning capabilities — in part through the work of Fedus and his team at OpenAI. Fedus was one of the small team who created ChatGPT to begin with and was running OpenAI’s uber important post-training team, which refines models after their initial development. Stitched together, the picture was clear: a simulation could theoretically discover new compounds, a robot could mix the materials, and an LLM could analyze the results and suggest course corrections. AI-automated material science was ready to be built. In fact, Cubuk was one of the researchers who published a groundbreaking paper in 2023 documenting a precursor Google research project. The team built a fully automated, robotic-powered lab and created 41 novel compounds from recipes suggested ...