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AI scientists and autonomous labs — automating physics, chemistry, and materials discovery
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2025 | Employees: ~50-100 (est.) | Stage: Early Stage VC ($1.3B seed valuation; ~$7B talks reported) | Website: https://periodic.com
Periodic Labs emerged from stealth on September 30, 2025 with an unusual founding pedigree: Liam Fedus, OpenAI's VP of Research who led post-training for ChatGPT (and the GPT-4 era post-training organization), left OpenAI to co-found the company with Ekin Dogus Cubuk, a Google Brain/DeepMind research scientist who specialized in applying machine learning to materials science and physics. Their thesis: the next frontier of AI isn't more chat — it's science, where models learn from physical experiments rather than internet text, and where breakthroughs (new superconductors, better batteries, novel materials) create trillions in value.
The company's approach pairs large-scale AI with autonomous robotic laboratories: AI systems propose experiments, robotic labs run them physically, and the re
Category: AI & Machine Learning Startups
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