Top 21 Startups developing AI for Scientific Research

Updated: Dec 14, 2025
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These startups create machine learning systems that can process scientific big data to find patterns and dependencies that are most likely to succeed. For example thus scientists can obtain new drugs, materials, genomes.
1
Onepot AI
Country: USA | Funding: $13M
Onepot.ai automates synthesis of small molecules from basic building blocks using chemical reactions. The company operates a small molecule synthesis lab, POT-1 and an LLM, which learns from all successful and unsuccessful experiments to predict what works and what doesn't when creating compounds and suggests potential molecules. As a result, Onepot has a catalog of molecules it can manufacture. Clients (biotech and pharma companies) select the desired compounds and Onepot's technology then synthesizes these molecules and ships them to the client for use in their experiments. They ship physical products either as dry compounds or as solutions in tablets or vials.
2
Periodic Labs
Country: USA | Funding: $300M
Periodic Labs develops artificial intelligence systems that simulate and predict the properties of materials using machine learning.
3
Lila Sciences
Country: USA | Funding: $200M
Lila Sciences creates a scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous labs for life sciences, chemistry, and materials science.
4
PhysicsX
Country: UK | Funding: $167M
PhysicsX is a developer of AI and simulation engineering technologies to reinvent the design and operation of machines and products.
5
Cradle
Country: Switzerland | Funding: $102.7M
Using robust prediction algorithms and AI design recommendations, Cradle assists biologists in rapidly designing better proteins.
6
Bioptimus
Country: France | Funding: $76M
Bioptimus is a developer of a universal AI foundation model for biology.
7
Medra AI
Country: USA | Funding: $63M
Medra AI is developing a robotic platform for scientific experiments - so-called "physical AI for scientists." The one-hand robot with multi-modal reasoning autonomously conducts laboratory experiments from start to finish. The company claims that it can use the same tools that scientists already use (meaning no need to purchase specialized lab equipment) and that researchers can instruct the robot ​​via natural language prompts. The company also offers scientific AI that reads and interprets experimental results. In collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Genentech (which is also a major investor) Medra is developing new drugs
8
Descartes Labs
Country: USA | Funding: $58.3M
Descartes Labs is building a data refinery for satellite imagery. For organizations that want to harness this power and enable computation at global scale, it's necessary to have a data refinery that combines data from multiple sources, cleans it up and makes it ready for science.
9
Latent Labs
Country: UK | Funding: $50M
Latent Labs is building AI foundation models to make biology programmable - to generate and optimize proteins.
10
Cervest
Country: UK | Funding: £32.7M
Cervest is building an AI-first platform to help businesses, governments and growers adapt to climate volatility, and protect our planet.
11
Spore.Bio
Country: France | Funding: $31.6M
Spore Biotechnologies is applying machine learning to microbiology testing
12
Iris.ai
Country: Norway | Funding: $28.6M
Iris is an AI Science Assistant, helping R&D double productivity when seeking out new opportunities in published research. Iris.ai uses a combination of keyword extraction, word embeddings, neural topic modeling, word importance based similarity of document metrics and hierarchical topic modeling. The approach is mainly unsupervised but we utilize an evaluated annotation set from our community of AI Trainers for benchmarking and improving our tools.
13
Bridgetown Research
Country: USA | Funding: $19M
Bridgetown Research creates AI agents with a research and analysis focus, utilizing primary and secondary data for verticals.
14
Argon AI
Country: USA | Funding: $11.5M
Argon AI is automating life sciences activities in clinical and commercial settings.
15
Converge Bio
Country: USA | Funding: $5.5M
Converge Bio integrates Generative AI with biological data.
16
SymbyAI
Country: USA | Funding: $4.8M
AI-driven peer review and replication for scientific papers
17
JADBio
Country: USA | Funding: €1.9M
JADBio’s robust AutoML tool provides a complete spectrum of data-analysis services in all phases of a scientific or business analytics study.
18
Rahko
Country: UK | Funding: £1.3M
Rahko is building quantum discovery capabilities for chemical simulation, which could enable groundbreaking advances in batteries, chemicals, advanced materials and drugs.
19
Green Dynamics
Country: Australia
Green Dynamics is a Australian company that offers services on designs, manufactures and wholesales lighting.
20
BioLizard
Country: Belgium
BioLizard is a bioinformatics and AI company that provides innovative solutions for all your scientific data needs.
21
Semantic Scholar
Country: USA
Semantic Scholar is an academic search engine from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. It too uses AI to search the academic literature and it is impressively fast.
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Siddhant Patel
Editor: Siddhant Patel
Siddhant Patel is a senior editor for AI-Startups. He is based out of India and has previously worked at publications including Huffington Post and The Next Web. Siddhant has a special interest in artificial intelligence and has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the industry. Siddhant graduated from the Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru). When he’s not writing, Siddhant is also a developer and has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. You can contact Siddhant at sidpatel(at)ai-startups(dot)pro