Medra Opens Largest Autonomous Lab in the US, Profiled in Ashlee Vance's Core Memory
A pharma factory for the AI age, built in 90 days.
Welcome to the scientific revolution. 100s of robots. Zero coffee breaks. America's largest autonomous lab, open today.
— Michelle Lee, founder and CEO of Medra
Our portfolio company Medra has opened Medra Lab 001, the largest autonomous lab in the United States. The launch was profiled in Ashlee Vance's Core Memory in a piece by Jolie Gan titled "A Hundred Robots Are Running A Bio Lab."
Medra Lab 001 is 38,000 square feet of San Francisco SoMa warehouse, stood up by Stanford-PhD-turned-robot-wrangler Michelle Lee on a 90-day deadline she set herself. Hundreds of robotic arms run across antibody discovery, protein engineering, gene editing, genomics, and cell biology, with a small courier robot ferrying consumables between stations. Medra's Vision Language Lab Action model now operates more than 75 percent of the instruments scientists already use, compared to roughly 5 percent for traditional lab automation. The bet is that AI can already invent drug candidates faster than humans can screen them, so the bottleneck in modern biotech is no longer ideas, it's labor. Genentech is already on the platform, alongside Cultivarium and Addition Therapeutics, with other top-ten pharma names filing in.
In Michelle's own words on launch day:
All the parameters, all the nuances, all this artisanal nature of science, logged and captured so our AI scientists can also learn from it and use that data to improve the science going forward.
This is not a prototype. This is something real. We're already running in production with biopharma companies like Genentech.
And now we're scaling in. 38,000 square feet, 100 robots running 24/7, built to scale scientific breakthrough right here in the United States.
She earned her bachelor's at Stanford and her doctorate in the Stanford AI Lab, then turned down a tenure-track professorship at NYU to start Medra. Her thesis was the COVID vaccine timeline: scientists had designed the vaccines in days, but the wet-lab work to test and manufacture them stretched the rollout to a year. Before Stanford, Michelle came to the US from Taiwan at fourteen and went on to intern at McKinsey, SpaceX, and NVIDIA. Hers is a TSMC-for-biology bet: domestic infrastructure that lets American AI compete on biology the way Taiwan competes on chips.
We've backed Michelle since pre-seed. Since then, Medra has publicly launched with $11M from Neo and Lux Capital, with participation from Arc Institute co-founder Patrick Hsu and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and raised a $52M Series A led by Human Capital with Lux Capital, Neo, Menlo Ventures, Catalio Capital Management, and 776. Watching her go from a borrowed robotic arm and a PowerPoint to the largest autonomous lab in the country has been a privilege. The team just keeps shipping, and they're hiring across science, engineering, deployments, and operations.
Read the Core Memory feature by Jolie Gan.
See the Medra Lab 001 launch page.