• ADIA joined Lila Sciences’ USD 200M seed round, backing its AI-driven autonomous labs for life, chemical, and material sciences research.
• Lila Sciences develops AI for scientific discovery, aiming to scale superintelligence platforms for experiment design, hypothesis testing, and automation.
• ADIA continues investing in AI, recently acquiring a $1B stake in Qlik, aligning with its long-term strategic technology investments.

What happened? The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) participated in the USD 200 million seed round of  US-based Lila Sciences.

Backed by the Moderna-founded Flagship Pioneering, Lila Sciences has also drawn seed capital from Blue Horizon Advisors, an investment firm with offices in the UAE and the UK.

Other investors include US capital firms Modi Ventures, March Capital, ARK Venture Fund and General Catalyst.

What will they do with the funding? With the funding, Lila Sciences aims to support the development of its AI platform, autonomous labs, and infrastructure for scaling. Additionally, it aims to build a superintelligence platform and fully autonomous labs for life, chemical and material sciences. 

Who are they? Established in 1976, ADIA is a globally-diversified investment institution that invests funds on behalf of the Government of Abu Dhabi. This is  through a strategy focused on long‑term value creation.

Meanwhile, Lila Sciences is a US-based tech company applying AI to life sciences. Furthermore, it was founded in 2023 aiming to develop an advanced form of AI that can assist scientists in designing and conducting new experiments, generating hypotheses and testing them in real world environments. 

“To achieve this, we must solve the hard problems to allow AI to autonomously and in a scalable manner run each step – from AI models generating an idea to reducing it to practice with robotics and automation.” said Geoffrey von Maltzahn, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lila Sciences and General Partner, Flagship Pioneering.

Why does this matter? The nearly USD 1.1 trillion ADIA has seen a focus on  AI investments. For instance, it has recently bought a USD 1 billion stake in the US data analytics software company Qlik. Additionally, it is worth noting that the fund recently invested USD 500 million in AlphaGen, a U.S. power company.