Periodic Labs

Periodic Labs is building AI scientists paired with autonomous laboratories that run experiments end-to-end, with the discovery of a high-temperature superconductor as its stated north star. The company was founded in 2025 by Liam Fedus, a co-creator of ChatGPT and former VP of research at OpenAI, and Ekin Doğuş Çubuk, who led the materials-discovery work behind Google DeepMind’s GNoME. Its first laboratory is built around powder synthesis, the cheap and general method by which a large fraction of solid-state materials are made. The company’s strategy is to start with a model trained to design a superconductor in-house and generalize that model into a commercial intelligence layer for every advanced-manufacturing firm whose researchers manually run read-simulate-experiment loops today.