Flagship Pioneering has launched Lila Sciences, a company building the first scientific superintelligence platform with fully autonomous labs for life, chemical, and materials sciences. Lila aims to develop advanced AI that not only analyzes data and predicts outcomes but also designs and executes experiments, generates hypotheses, and tests them in real-world environments. The company has raised $200 million in seed capital from investors including Flagship Pioneering, General Catalyst, March Capital, ARK Venture Fund, and others. Lila’s platform integrates generative AI with autonomous science units to scale and optimize experimentation across scientific domains. In its early development, the platform has achieved significant milestones, including outperforming existing therapeutics in genetic medicine design, discovering hundreds of novel biological compounds, and creating advanced materials for green hydrogen production and carbon capture.
Lila’s leadership team includes Co-Founder and CEO Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Co-Founder and President Molly Gibson, and renowned geneticist George Church as Chief Scientist. The team also features Andrew Beam as CTO, Kenneth Stanley as Senior Vice President, Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli as CSO of Materials, and Christopher Fussell as President of Operations. Lila plans to collaborate with partners in life and material sciences to accelerate scientific solutions in health and sustainability. Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of Lila Sciences, stated, “With Lila, our hypothesis is that by scaling experimentation, we can unlock emergent abilities and enable discoveries that remain hidden at smaller scales. Lila represents an ambitious undertaking that we believe will accelerate science with enormous benefit to society.”
