AI research lab, Lila Sciences has secured $115 million in new funding led by Nvidia’s venture arm, making its valuation over $1.3 billion just two years after its founding in 2023. This latest round brings Lila’s total Series A to $350 million and its overall capital raised to $550 million. It drew in heavyweight investors such as Flagship Pioneering, General Catalyst, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. It marks a pivotal step in Lila’s push to accelerate scientific discovery through proprietary, AI-driven research environments.
Unlike many AI labs focused on mining existing datasets, Lila’s central pursuit is to build “scientific superintelligence”, a new class of AI that generates original data through physical experimentation. The company’s flagship innovation, the “AI Science Factory,” connects robotic laboratory instruments with specialized AI agents capable of designing, executing, and learning from experiments at industrial scale.
These facilities run continuously, closing the loop from hypothesis to real-world testing hundreds or thousands of times faster than traditional research teams.
Lila recently signed a 235,500-square-foot lease in Cambridge, one of the largest lab deals in Boston this year, preparing to scale its AI-powered labs and strengthen its physical footprint. Additional sites in Boston, San Francisco, and London will further globalize its research platform.
The Shift
Industry experts have warned that traditional AI models are exhausting curated data sources such as scientific papers and databases. Lila’s approach, generating proprietary experimental data instead of relying on what’s already known, positions the company at the heart of genuine discovery.
The AI agents hypothesize, design novel tests, analyze results, and iterate, promising emergent breakthroughs in fields spanning life sciences, chemistry, and advanced materials.
“Future leadership in AI for science isn’t about building the biggest data center. It’s about owning the most automated labs and running the most experiments,” said CEO Geoffrey von Maltzahn. The company already claims thousands of discoveries across domains, with platforms attracting interest from energy, semiconductor, and pharmaceutical players.
With its latest funding, Lila is starting to offer its AI and laboratory platform to commercial partners through enterprise software, enabling external firms to tap into next-generation experimental AI. Rather than launching drugs or new energy products directly, Lila focuses on providing the underlying research infrastructure for partners and startups.
“Those are going to be done by partners of Lila and startups that are on a Lila platform,” von Maltzahn clarified.
AI For Science
Lila’s syndicate of investors now includes Nvidia’s NVentures, IQT (the intelligence community’s venture arm), Analog Devices, and a roster representing $2 trillion in assets under management. This mix spotlights both commercial and national security interest in scaling automated scientific R&D.
Following a trend in venture capital towards “AI for science,” Lila joins the likes of Periodic Labs, which recently raised $300 million to build an AI scientist. The surge of capital into Lila highlights both investor enthusiasm and the changing landscape for scientific research.
As AI becomes an engine for experimentation and learning in real-world environments, Lila’s AI Science Factories enable a closed feedback loop, where the machine can hypothesize, test, and refine at speeds unattainable by human teams.
The company’s scaling law thesis asserts that discovery rate and novelty compound as the number of experiments increases, analogously to how large language models flourish with more training data.
“We’re going to use those resources very productively in a way that I feel benefits almost everyone on the planet. It will set in motion the scientific method in a new form,” said Von Maltzahn.
