Autoscience, a San Mateo-based applied research lab, has successfully raised $14 million in seed funding to advance what it claims is the world’s first automated AI research lab. This funding round was led by General Catalyst, with additional participation from Toyota Ventures, Perplexity Fund, MaC Ventures, and S32.
The company is developing a virtual AI laboratory that utilizes autonomous AI scientists and engineers to invent, test, and deploy new machine learning models without needing human input. Autoscience’s initiative aims to tackle a growing challenge in AI development: while computational resources and data have become increasingly available, the human ability to conceive and assess innovative ideas has emerged as the primary bottleneck.
With over 2,000 machine learning research papers published each week, Autoscience asserts that traditional research teams struggle to keep pace. Its platform is designed to continuously generate hypotheses, validate them through experimentation, and implement improvements into production systems. By combining automated scientists that explore algorithmic ideas with engineers that optimize and operationalize successful models, the company seeks to revolutionize the research landscape.
Autoscience has already achieved notable milestones, including the production of what it claims was the first peer-reviewed scientific paper authored by an AI system at an ICLR 2025 workshop. The company also secured a silver medal in the Kaggle Santa 2025 competition, competing against over 3,300 teams, marking a significant achievement for a fully autonomous system in a live event.
The newly acquired funding will be directed toward expanding Autoscience’s platform among Fortune 500 companies and large private enterprises, especially in high-stakes sectors such as financial services, manufacturing, and fraud detection. Its managed service enables the deployment of hundreds of automated AI researchers simultaneously, facilitating the continuous evolution of machine learning models at scale. Additionally, a portion of the investment will be allocated to grow its engineering team, accelerating the development of its autonomous research capabilities.
“We’ve reached a point where human intuition is no longer enough to navigate the complexity of algorithmic discovery. We’ve built a research organization where the researchers are AI systems. We aim to compress a decade of machine learning research into months, unlocking new AI capabilities for scientists and forming a competitive edge for our customers,” said Eliot Cowan, CEO of Autoscience.
“We believe Autoscience is tackling an increasingly important challenge in machine learning: the pace and scalability of experimentation. As research output continues to grow, teams are looking for ways to more efficiently test, validate, and translate new ideas into production systems. We’re excited about their progress in advancing autonomous R&D to scale that workflow,” added Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director at General Catalyst.
As AI continues to evolve, the potential for autonomous systems to significantly impact research methodologies and operational efficiencies in various sectors is becoming increasingly apparent. Autoscience’s innovative approach may pave the way for a new era in artificial intelligence research, where traditional limitations imposed by human capacity and intuition are transcended, potentially unlocking unprecedented advancements in technology and business applications.
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