Former Google, OpenAI researchers floated startup Periodic Labs bags seed funding

02 Oct 2025, 04:40 PM

The funding was raised from investors including a16z, Felicis, DST, NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and Accel.

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Periodic Labs, a startup launched by former Google and OpenAI researchers, has received seed funding from marquee investors including a16z, Felicis, DST, NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and Accel.

Prominent individuals including Jeff Bezos, Elad Gil, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Dean have also pumped in capital, according to a company's blogpost.

The startup, which aims to reimagine how science is done, has raised $300 million as part of its seed funding round, the Techcrunch said.

The fresh capital will help the startup to expand its team, upgrade its labs, and develop the first generation of AI scientists.

Periodic Labs was founded by Ekin Dogus Cubuk, who earlier worked at Google Brain and DeepMind, and Liam Fedus, who was previously at OpenAI.

The blogpost said that the goals of the startup is to discover superconductors that work at higher temperatures than today's materials.

The startup for instance is helping a semiconductor manufacturer that is facing issues with heat dissipation on their chips. 

"We’re training custom agents for their engineers and researchers to make sense of their experimental data in order to iterate faster," it added.

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