Medra, a San Francisco-based biotech and artificial intelligence startup, has announced a $52 million Series A funding round led by Human Capital with participation from existing backers Lux Capital, Neo, and NFDG, as well as new investors Catalio Capital Management, Menlo Ventures, Seven Seven Six (776), Fusion Fund and others, bringing its total capital raised to approximately $63 million as it scales its vision of autonomous scientific discovery. The company, which only recently emerged from stealth, is pioneering a new category in biopharma R&D with what it calls a “Physical AI Scientist” a tightly integrated system combining its Scientific AI, which can generate hypotheses, design experiments, and interpret results, and Physical AI, which uses general-purpose robotics to autonomously run experiments with the flexibility of human scientists and the scalability of machines.
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Medra asserts that closing the loop between prediction, execution and learning will help solve long-standing bottlenecks in drug discovery by enabling continuous experimentation at a scale and speed far beyond traditional manual and fragmented lab workflows, ultimately accelerating the development of new therapies. Medra’s platform already has early collaboration traction with leading biopharma partners, including Genentech, Cultivarium and Addition Therapeutics, and the company plans to build and launch its own large-scale autonomous lab in 2026 to further advance its integrated system. In a statement, the Medra team highlighted the importance of combining AI reasoning with physical execution in the lab to fully unlock the potential of AI-driven science, noting that even powerful models like Claude or GPT-5 cannot validate ideas unless AI “leaves the screen” and operates in the real world. With this fresh capital, Medra is accelerating hiring across software, hardware, operations, science and robotics, strengthening partnerships and scaling its closed-loop scientific platform to redefine how experiments are designed, executed and continuously improved for faster therapeutic breakthroughs.