Medra

Medra builds autonomous laboratory systems for biopharma and research teams. Its platform pairs general-purpose robots that operate the instruments scientists already use (the company calls this Physical AI) with a scientific reasoning layer that writes protocols from plain-language instructions, interprets results and adjusts the next experiment. Medra describes the combination as a Physical AI Scientist. The company was founded in 2022 by CEO Michelle Lee and is based in San Francisco. Its advisors include Bob McGrew, formerly chief research officer at OpenAI, Markforged co-founder David Benhaim and Arc Institute co-founder Patrick Hsu.

Medra came out of stealth on September 11, 2025, when Endpoints News reported that it had raised $11 million to automate labs. Three months later, on December 11, 2025, the company announced a $52 million Series A led by Human Capital, with participation from existing investors Lux Capital, Neo and NFDG and new investors Catalio Capital Management, Menlo Ventures and 776. The company's site also lists BoxGroup among its backers. By June 2026 Medra said it had raised more than $60 million in total, naming Human Capital, Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Catalio Capital, Neo, 776 and Fusion Fund as investors.

Medra is an early-stage private company and has not disclosed a valuation or revenue. Customers and partners it has named include Genentech, Cultivarium and Addition Therapeutics, the gene editing company for which it published an RNA transfection case study. In April 2026 it opened Medra Lab 001 (ML001) in San Francisco, which it says was built in 77 days and which runs assays in antibody discovery, protein engineering, gene editing and cell biology. In June 2026 it launched AI Experimentalist, its reasoning layer, and announced a project funded by DARPA to turn natural-language scientific goals and human-written protocols into machine-executable experiments.

Medra illustrates how quickly capital has moved into AI-for-science companies that own a physical data-generation layer rather than models alone. Seed-stage backers Lux Capital, Neo, NFDG and BoxGroup were joined within three months of launch by a Series A syndicate led by Human Capital, a pattern of compressed seed-to-A timelines typical of well-networked AI teams in 2025. Its investors are betting that proprietary experimental data, captured at scale by robots, becomes a durable advantage in drug discovery. Any outcome for early backers is still years away.