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A photograph of Kevin Weil, founder of Warp Sciences and former OpenAI science lead, smiling in a teal shirt.

Kevin Weil, OpenAI's former science lead, has launched Warp Sciences, a startup built to automate the wet-lab work behind drug discovery. The company trains robots to make and test promising compounds identified by researchers, and it starts with serious backing: Weil announced on X that Warp Sciences has raised 215 million dollars at an 865 million dollar valuation. Lightspeed led the round, with participation from IVP, Premji Invest, and Lux Capital.

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DeepSeek has reportedly raised about 15 billion dollars, roughly 100 billion yuan, in one of the largest funding rounds ever completed by a Chinese AI company. TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, reported the raise on Thursday morning, just two days after the United States ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek technology from their systems over security concerns. Battery maker CATL and Tencent, the company behind WeChat, were named among the investors.

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Recursive CEO Richard Socher speaking on stage at a TED conference.

Recursive released its first model, Flint, on Wednesday, and the model is not the most interesting part of the story. Flint is a free coding model that runs on a laptop, built in under four months by a small team whose main collaborator was the company's own automated research system, the Eureka Machine. Recursive, founded last year and led by former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, says Eureka helped with nearly every step, from pretraining to post-training and inference.

Read more about Recursive's Flint Was Largely Built by AI, and It Runs on Your Laptop