Andreessen Horowitz led the funding round for the new startup, with Toronto-based Radical joining other investors including Accel, Felicis, and Khosla Ventures. Periodic is hiring engineers and researchers for its new lab in Menlo Park, Calif. (The Logic)

Talking point: The startup aims to automate more of the scientific process, combining large foundation models with self-driving labs that can run experiments and feed the data they generate back into the system. (A group at the University of Toronto is doing something similar.) Periodic hopes to produce better materials it can sell to heavy industries like hardware manufacturing and space. The firm recruited from major corporate AI labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Several founding staff have Montreal ties, including co-founder William Fedus, who got his PhD at Université de Montréal under Yoshua Bengio and Hugo Larochelle; Dzmitry Bahdanau, formerly of ServiceNow and Element AI; and Rishabh Agarwal, an adjunct professor at McGill University.