Periodic Labs

AI-for-science research lab building autonomous laboratories operated by AI scientists, with the goal of generating proprietary experimental data that does not exist on the internet. Initial focus is physical sciences and materials discovery — stated targets include higher-temperature superconductors — and the company also deploys custom AI agents for industry partners, including a semiconductor manufacturer working on chip heat dissipation. Founded in 2025 by Liam Fedus (former OpenAI VP of Research and a ChatGPT co-creator) and Ekin Dogus Cubuk (former Google DeepMind materials and chemistry lead and GNoME co-creator). The founding team of roughly 20 includes researchers behind OpenAI's Operator, Microsoft's MatterGen, and the neural attention mechanism. Emerged from stealth on 30 September 2025 with a $300M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Felicis, DST, NVentures (NVIDIA), Accel, and angels including Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean, and Elad Gil.