Kevin Weil raising $150M for AI science startup
The AI talent exodus from OpenAI keeps producing new companies: former chief product officer Kevin Weil is raising a nine-figure round for an AI-for-science startup, and CoreWeave's earnings showed the infrastructure buildout underneath it all is still accelerating.
Kevin Weil, OpenAI's former chief product officer, is seeking to raise $150 million for a new AI science startup at a valuation of at least $750 million, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. Business Insider reports the details are not finalized and could still change, and Weil did not respond to a request for comment. Sources say he has pitched the company as a way to gather scientific data for AI models — a thesis that extends the work he led at OpenAI, where he oversaw OpenAI for Science and Prism, a workspace designed to put frontier models directly into scientists' workflows before his departure in April.
Weil is the second senior OpenAI leader this week to announce a next act — OpenAI's Brad Lightcap exits after eight years to start something new. The pattern is the story: a growing wave of OpenAI and Google alumni are starting companies that promise to accelerate scientific discovery, from designing drugs to running autonomous experiments, and investors are paying up for the thesis. A $750 million valuation on an unrevealed product is a bet on Weil's track record — product chief at Instagram, Twitter, and Meta — more than on anything he has shown yet. That is how this corner of the market is moving: the next frontier is being priced before it ships.
CoreWeave's Q2 report showed AI infrastructure demand still running hot: revenue rose 112% year over year to $2.58 billion, slightly ahead of the $2.56 billion analysts expected, and the revenue backlog hit $104 billion as of June 30. The company said that figure excludes another $25 billion in Q3 commitments, and it ended the quarter with 1.5 GW of contracted power. Adjusted EBITDA reached $1.51 billion, adjusted operating income of $128 million beat the $66 million consensus, and the net loss per share of $1.14 came in better than the $1.41 expected. Shares jumped as much as 12% after hours.
The print is an answer to the bear case that had dragged the stock down more than 30% since May over spending and financing concerns. CEO Michael Intrator called it "an important inflection point" as scale translates into operating leverage — though adjusted net loss still widened to $567 million from $130 million a year ago, so the leverage story is early. With SpaceX now renting its own data-center capacity to Anthropic and Google, CoreWeave also has a new competitor that was a customer's parent company a year ago. For now, the numbers argue the GPU cloud's economics improve as it grows; the question is whether that holds as the buildout gets more crowded.
What to watch: whether Weil's round closes at that valuation — and what it says about how much money is chasing AI-for-science startups.
Frontier-lab executives keep leaving to automate scientific discovery — is that the next real AI market, or the next hype cycle? Tell us in the comments.
