AutoScience, a San Mateo-based applied research institute, announced it has raised $14 million in seed funding to develop what it calls the world’s first automated AI research laboratory. The round was led by General Catalyst with participation from Toyota Ventures, Perplexity Fund, MaC Ventures, and S32.
The company is building a virtual AI lab of autonomous AI scientists and engineers who can invent, test, and deploy new machine learning models without human intervention. Autoscience aims to address the growing challenges in artificial intelligence development. Computing and data are abundant, but the human ability to generate and evaluate new ideas remains a major bottleneck.
With over 2,000 machine learning research papers published every week, AutoScience believes traditional research teams cannot effectively keep up. Its platform is designed to continuously generate hypotheses, validate them through experimentation, and deploy improvements to production systems. The system combines automated scientists who explore algorithmic ideas with automated engineers who optimize and operationalize successful models.
AutoScience has already demonstrated early milestones. The autonomous system produced what is said to be the first peer-reviewed scientific paper written by an AI system at the ICLR 2025 workshop. It also won a silver medal in the Kaggle Santa 2025 competition, where it competed against more than 3,300 teams, making it the first fully autonomous system in a Kaggle live event.
The company plans to use the funding to expand its platform to Fortune 500 companies and large private companies, particularly in high-stakes areas such as financial services, manufacturing, and fraud detection. The company’s managed services deploy hundreds of automated AI researchers simultaneously, enabling continuous improvement of machine learning models at scale. The funding will also be used to grow the engineering team to accelerate the development of autonomous research capabilities.
Important quote:
“We have reached a point where human intuition alone is no longer sufficient to navigate the complexities of algorithmic discovery. We have built a research organization where researchers are AI systems. We aim to compress a decade of machine learning research into months, unlocking new AI capabilities for scientists and shaping the competitive edge of our customers.”
Elliott Cowan, Autoscience CEO
“We believe AutoScience is addressing the increasingly important challenges in machine learning: pace of experimentation and scalability. As research output continues to grow, the team is looking for ways to more efficiently test, validate, and translate new ideas into production systems. We are excited about their progress in advancing autonomous R&D to extend that workflow.”
Yuri Sagalov, Managing Director, General Catalyst
