Overview

• Periodic Labs emerged from stealth with a $300 million seed round backed by Andreessen Horowitz, DST, Nvidia, Accel, and prominent figures including Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean, and Elad Gil.
• Ekin Dogus Cubuk and Liam Fedus lead the startup, bringing experience from DeepMind/Google Brain’s materials work and OpenAI research that helped create ChatGPT and trillion-parameter models.
• The company aims to automate scientific discovery by deploying AI agents in self-driving labs that run, analyze, and iterate on physical experiments.
• Its initial targets include discovering higher‑performance superconductors, and reporting indicates early work with an unnamed semiconductor manufacturer on chip heat dissipation challenges.
• A core objective is to build a proprietary corpus of experimental results—including negative outcomes—to train next‑generation models, positioning the venture within a growing field of AI‑driven materials discovery efforts.