AI can help discover new medicines, but making them is another story. Multiply Labs, a robotics startup based in San Francisco, wants to solve that.
The company, which builds robots for manufacturing complex drugs, announced on Tuesday that it raised $75 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to more than $100 million since its founding in 2016. The round was led by NantWorks, a holding company founded by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong. Other investors include AstraZeneca, a Multiply customer, Lux Capital, and Founders Fund.
“Someone has to make the drugs,” Multiply CEO Fred Parietti told Business Insider. The company’s office, which I visited this summer, is a large warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. Its robot is a large, long box packed with test tubes and robotic arms.
The round comes as investors pour money into “physical AI” — AI systems that act in the real world. Multiply has deployed its machines with a small group of customers. That means the company is still early, and its next test is whether it can turn a small number of expensive, highly specialized machines into a scalable manufacturing business. Today, each robot costs several million dollars to build and relies on a supply chain spread across Europe.
Multiply automates the production of gene therapies and mRNA treatments, which are still largely made manually in laboratories. Production is slow, difficult to scale, and vulnerable to human error and contamination. Manufacturing some gene therapies can cost more than $1 million per dose, according to a 2025 research paper.
“The only way to hit throughput, cost, and quality is with robotics,” said Parietti. “It must cost not like a house, but like a car. So from millions [of dollars] to tens of thousands.”
Drugmakers such as AstraZeneca and Legend Biotech purchase Multiply’s robots and operate them at their own facilities. Multiply also makes money from cartridges used in the machines and from service and support. Parietti wouldn’t say exactly how many machines Multiply has deployed, but said it’s a “high single-digit number.”
See the pitch deck Multiply used to raise $75 million below.
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