San Francisco doesn’t just launch startups, it launches obsessions. Medra just proved that again, locking in an $11M pre-seed led by Human Capital, Neo and LDV Partners, with angels Patrick Hsu, Arash Ferdowsi, Frederic Kerrest and Nish Bhat backing the vision. This isn’t another “AI + robots” headline. It’s a real play at fixing biotech’s biggest blind spot, labs running 21st-century science on processes that look like they were frozen in the 80s.
Michelle Lee, PhD, founder & CEO, saw it firsthand. Born in Taiwan, raised in the US, sharpened at Stanford robotics, she spotted the disconnect walking through pharma labs. Autonomous vehicles were flexing AI and computer vision, while drug discovery was still pipetting like it was karaoke night. That disconnect became Medra. Incorporated July 2021, planted in SF at 340 Pine St with operations on New Montgomery, and now a 20-person team working 5 days a week in-person. No remote experiments here, robots need builders in the room, not avatars on Zoom.
So what did Medra actually build? The Continuous Science Platform, a system that fuses Physical AI and Scientific AI. Modular robotic workcells with swappable parts. Text-to-protocol conversion using NLP. Computer vision that doesn’t just spot errors but resumes protocols mid-stream. Multimodal reasoning across messy data, images, and results. Closed-loop optimization that not only runs experiments but adapts them in real time. And the secret sauce, “infra-data,” granular scientific detail no human ever thought to log until the robots started paying attention.
Customers aren’t science-fair projects, they’re Addition Therapeutics, Pheast, Cultivarium and Lila. Case studies with Addition and Lila prove this isn’t hype. It’s live, deployed, and running antibody design, gene therapy dev and complex assays at scale. That’s why the $11M matters. It’s not vanity. It’s the fuel for a biotech market worth ~$8B today, on track to hit $15B by 2034.
Founders can take a lesson here: Michelle Lee didn’t chase buzzwords. She crossed robotics and biotech, built tech that mattered on day 1, and walked into fundraising with proof in hand. That’s how you attract investors like Human Capital, Neo and LDV Partners. You don’t pitch the future, you show it’s already running.
