$200M for Periodic Labs: Former Open AI and Deepmind team raises funds to discover new materials

Venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz will lead a $200 million investment round in Periodic Labs, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to research and discover new materials.

This was reported by Bloomberg, citing its own sources.

• The company, which has only been around for a few months, is already valued at $1 billion.

• Periodic Labs was founded by Liam Fedus, former vice president of research at OpenAI and one of the key contributors to the launch of ChatGPT, and Ekin Dogus Cubuk, a former scientist at Google DeepMind’s research division. Their goal is to use AI to study the properties of materials and potentially create new ones.

• Initially, OpenAI planned to lead the round, but according to sources, the startup team decided that Andreessen Horowitz would be able to provide more resources.

At the same time, OpenAI will still join the funding and will likely collaborate with the company in the future.

Thus, Periodic Labs joins the ranks of ambitious projects created by former OpenAI employees, whom investors are already comparing to the “PayPal mafia.” This is an informal group of former employees and founders of PayPal who later became the founders and owners of many well-known technology and financial companies, such as Tesla, LinkedIn, Palantir, SpaceX, YouTube, and Yelp.

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