Background
<cite index="15-2">Kevin Weil served as Chief Product Officer (CPO) of OpenAI from 2024 to 2025, and subsequently as the vice president who founded and led OpenAI for Science, a research group launched to apply artificial intelligence to scientific discovery.</cite> <cite index="15-3">Before OpenAI, he spent roughly fifteen years building consumer and developer products at several defining companies, including Senior Vice President of Product at Twitter, Vice President of Product at Instagram, Vice President of Product for the Facebook cryptocurrency effort behind Libra and Novi, and President of Product and Business at the Earth-imaging company Planet Labs.</cite>
<cite index="16-3">Weil joined OpenAI as chief product officer in June 2024.</cite> <cite index="11-14">OpenAI for Science was the internal research group behind Prism, an AI-powered platform that promised to accelerate scientific discovery.</cite> <cite index="15-1">Weil left OpenAI on April 17, 2026, when the company decentralized OpenAI for Science into its other research teams.</cite> <cite index="11-2">His departure came a day after his team released GPT-Rosalind, a new model to accelerate life sciences research and drug discovery.</cite>
The New Venture
<cite index="2-1">Weil is seeking to raise $150 million for a new AI science startup at a valuation of at least $750 million, according to *Business Insider*, citing three people with knowledge of the discussions.</cite> <cite index="2-3,2-4">Terms remain unsettled and are subject to revision, and the exact nature of the startup has not been disclosed, but Weil has pitched it as a vehicle for gathering scientific data to train AI models.</cite>
<cite index="21-1">As of the time of reporting, Weil has yet to publicly reveal the startup's name or product.</cite> <cite index="13-8">Exactly how Weil plans to collect that data — whether through its own laboratories, partnerships, acquired datasets, or software embedded in existing labs — remains unclear.</cite>
Competitive Landscape
<cite index="13-14">Periodic Labs, founded by former OpenAI researcher Liam Fedus and former Google DeepMind researcher Ekin Dogus Cubuk, raised a $300 million seed round to build AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories in which they operate.</cite> <cite index="1-5">*Business Insider* described the fundraising as a broader sign that AI's next frontier is shifting from chatbots to science.</cite>
Broader OpenAI Leadership Exodus
Weil's fundraising effort surfaces against a backdrop of significant executive turnover at OpenAI. <cite index="32-12">In April, three executives — Weil, Bill Peebles, and Srinivas Narayanan — announced their exits as the company consolidated around its core products.</cite> <cite index="30-1">On August 11, 2026, Brad Lightcap, one of the longest-serving executives at OpenAI, announced he was leaving the lab to "start something new."</cite> <cite index="32-6">Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 and, over eight years, rose through a succession of senior positions, culminating in a four-year run as chief operating officer.</cite>
<cite index="10-5">Axios noted that a significant number of people have left OpenAI in recent months, including a number focused on AI safety.</cite> <cite index="37-4,37-5">Lightcap's exit comes amid a broader trend of longtime AI executives leaving their firms, with another high-profile example being Jeff Dean, who left Google to start Discovery Loop.</cite>
Status
<cite index="25-2">*Business Insider* noted that terms remain unsettled and are subject to revision, and that Weil did not respond when approached for comment.</cite> No investors, closing date, or formal company name have been publicly disclosed.