Cristian Ponce was wearing an Indiana Jones costume when he met his co-founder Théo Schäfer. It was at a Halloween party in 2023 thrown by Entrepreneur First, a startup program that introduces founders to one another before they launch an idea.

The two hit it off, Ponce remembers. Schäfer had studied at MIT with a masters in underwater autonomous robots and worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab exploring Jupiter's moons for alien life. "Crazy stuff," Ponce grins. "I was coming from Cal Tech, doing bioengineering" where he worked on E. coli.

The two bonded over stories about the drudgery of being a lab technician. Ponce (pictured above left) especially complained about all the manual labor involved in genetic engineering. The lowly lab tech can spend hours with a scientific syringe "pipette," manually moving liquids from tube to tube.

Attempts to automate the process have not taken off because the robots capable of doing it are specialized, expensive, and require special programming skills. Every time the scientists need to change an experiment's parameters - which is all the time - they'd have to wait for the programmer to program the bot, debug it, and so on. In most cases, it's easier, cheaper, and more precise to use a human.

The company they founded, Tetsuwan Scientific, set out to address this problem by modifying lower-cost white label lab robots.

But then in May 2024, the cofounders were watching OpenAI's multi-model product launch (the one that ticked off Scarlett Johansson with a sound-alike voice). OpenAI showed people talking to the model.

It was the missing link Tetsuwan Scientific needed. "We're looking at like this crazy breakneck progress of large language models right before our eyes, their scientific reasoning capabilities," Ponce said.

After the demo, Ponce fired up GPT 4 and showed it an image ...