Lila Sciences
companyLila Sciences
Type: Private autonomous laboratory company — Flagship Pioneering / NVIDIA-backed
Lila Sciences calls itself a "scientific superintelligence" company. Founded by Flagship Pioneering (also behind Moderna), launched March 2025 with $200M seed financing, then raised $115M Series A extension in October 2025 — total $550M, valuation ~$1.3B.
The core product is AI Science Factories: fully automated laboratory facilities that integrate large foundation-scale scientific language models with general-purpose lab robots, sensors, and data infrastructure into one closed loop. AI designs experiments → robots execute → sensors measure → AI interprets → AI redesigns. The goal is to replace the traditional human-in-the-loop research team for certain categories of scientific questions.
Lila's stated domain is cross-disciplinary: biology, chemistry, and materials science. Unlike Emerald Cloud Lab (which automates execution of human-specified experiments), Lila claims the AI also does the experimental design — making it a genuinely autonomous loop, not just fast automation.
NVIDIA connection: NVIDIA-backed (NVentures); Lila uses BioNeMo for AI inference. This is part of NVIDIA's strategy to position its compute as the hardware backbone of the autonomous lab sector.
Key numbers
- Seed: $200M (Mar 2025)
- Series A extension: $115M (Oct 2025)
- Total raised: $550M
- Valuation: ~$1.3B
What to watch
- First scientific output from an AI Science Factory (paper, patent, or partner program disclosure)
- Whether the platform generalizes beyond narrow wet-lab protocols to genuinely novel hypotheses
- Lila is the purest bet on autonomous science as a standalone category