Our Investment in Periodic Labs

Working with Liam Fedus at OpenAI, I was amazed by his brilliance, leadership of the research team, and all the advancements he drove in ChatGPT. When I heard he was starting a company, I texted him immediately.

Liam and I went for a Monday morning walk in Noe Valley right after he left OpenAI. When I learned he was teaming up with Dogus Cubuk, the former chemistry and physics research lead at Google DeepMind and author on the pivotal GNoME paper, I knew there would never be two cofounders more perfect for AI materials discovery.

I committed on the spot to write the first check into their company. We couldn’t have been earlier. In fact, we had to wait to sign the term sheet because the company had not yet been named, nor was it incorporated.

Our immediate conviction in Periodic Labs is rooted in the vision, the team, and their unique approach, and we’re thrilled that our commitment allowed them to immediately start building their founding team. 

Periodic Labs is building a new way to do science. Liam said something to me on that walk that immediately resonated: “In order to do science, you have to do real science.” They’re combining compute with a physical lab to turn AI into an engine for discovery. Models that can form hypotheses, run simulations, and plan syntheses, and automated labs that can execute those syntheses and feed results back into the system. Every experiment, whether it works or fails, expands the knowledge base that never existed before. This loop between models and labs is what gives Periodic Labs the ability to push forward scientific discoveries.

The potential impact is huge. Traditional materials discovery can take decades; Periodic Labs aims to compress that into a fraction of the time. Goals include discovering room-temperature superconductivity, enabling next-generation transportation, more efficient power grids, and new supercomputers and computing architectures. Their work will affect industries that account for trillions in global GDP.

Liam and Dogus are the perfect founders and have built a world-class founding team to execute on this vision. Liam was the VP of Post Training at OpenAI and drove advances in ChatGPT and Operator (now Agent), with a PhD from MILA and prior work at Google. Dogus earned his PhD at Harvard and completed a postdoc at Stanford, led Materials Science and Chemistry Research at DeepMind, where he co-authored GNoME, which identified millions of new stable crystals. This entire founding team has also contributed to neural network attention, the Materials Project, and MatterGen, work that has shaped both AI and materials science over the past decade.

We’re proud to support Periodic Labs as they set out to change how discovery happens, and we’re excited to see what they uncover next.

Thank you to James Detweiler for your partnership on our investment in Periodic Labs.