Biotech incubator Flagship Pioneering has uncorked its latest company. Lila Sciences is looking to use $200 million in seed funding to develop new advanced AI that can power fully autonomous research labs, according to a March 10 press release.
In addition to Flagship, the financing comes from 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, according to the release.
Lila’s mission is to achieve “scientific superintelligence” that is able to help scientists generate ideas and hypotheses and then design and conduct experiments to test those hypotheses, CEO Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Ph.D., said in the release.
“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,” von Maltzahn said.
Since Lila’s 2023 founding, Flagship claims the company’s platform has already achieved groundbreaking results in various scientific areas. This includes large language models with state-of-the-art scientific reasoning abilities, the generation of genetic medicine constructs that perform better than commercially available therapeutics, and the discovery and validation of hundreds of new antibodies, peptides and binders for a broad range of therapeutic targets, according to the release.
Since Lila has been operating in stealth since its founding, details of these results are not publicly available.
Lila is open to providing its platform to partners across the life and materials sciences, Flagship said.
In addition to von Moltzahn, Lila’s leadership team includes Andrew Beam, Ph.D., as chief technology officer and CRISPR pioneer George Church, Ph.D., as chief scientist.
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The company is currently working to expand its lab space in Flagship’s facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it plans to open offices in London and San Francisco over the next two years, according to a report from The New York Times.
Flagship’s biotech portfolio has seen some turbulence in recent months. Last month, Novo Nordisk-partnered Omega Therapeutics struck a restructuring deal with its founder Flagship that has sent the firm on the path towards bankruptcy.
In addition, viral vector-focused Ring Therapeutics and cell signaling company Sonata Therapeutics, both backed by Flagship, ended 2024 with rounds of layoffs that also saw both of their CEOs hit the exit.