Hosain Rahman

After working shoulder-to-shoulder with @kevinweil in the trenches, and jamming w @dpatil for a couple of decades (!), we’d be excited about backing almost anything these guys decided to build together. But when they told us about @warpsciences, my immediate reaction was: this isn't just a big idea, it is an idea that is desperately needed.  Here's why: About 20 years ago, the US pharma industry made an enormous strategic mistake. Lured by lower costs, the industry began outsourcing a critical component of drug discovery to China. At first, the advantage was economic. But over time, China built something far more formidable: a world-class chemistry talent base, massive research infrastructure, and the ability to execute drug discovery work at extraordinary speed and scale. It started as a cost-saving decision and now has become a total structural dependency. Bonkers. In the process, we allowed much of the expertise, infrastructure, and capacity underpinning American drug innovation to migrate overseas. We effectively ceded a critical part of our drug discovery engine to China. Think about that for a moment. One of America's most strategically important industries now relies heavily on a geopolitical rival for a foundational part of its innovation process. It's beyond wild that we let ourselves get here. So that's what makes Warp so compelling. Warp is building a next-generation, U.S.-based chemistry contract research organization (a “CRO”), combining world-class chemists, AI, and robotics to fundamentally reinvent how molecules are made and tested. @kevinweil, @dpatil, @manohar_paluri, and Sol Reisberg's ambition goes well beyond simply bringing this capability back to American soil. It's about building a fundamentally better model for drug discovery. Every experiment generates data. That data trains better AI models. Better models make the labs smarter and more productive. And more productive labs enable scientists to explore more ideas, faster. It's a compounding flywheel of scientific discovery. If Warp succeeds, we won't just have brought a critical capability back home - we'll have rebuilt it in a way that's faster, smarter, and more scalable than what came before. That's a future at 01A we're incredibly excited to help back.