Molecule.one Plans to Triple Sales Again in 2026

Warsaw-based startup Molecule.one closed out 2025 with revenue tripled compared to the previous year, surpassing 10 million zloty. The company, which combines artificial intelligence models with an autonomous chemistry lab to speed up drug discovery, says it aims to repeat that growth rate in 2026.

Molecule.one was founded in 2018 by Piotr Byrski, Paweł Włodarczyk-Pruszyński and Dr. Stanisław Jastrzębski. The company built a platform called Maria that combines AI models, a high-throughput autonomous lab and its own database of chemical reactions. The goal is to shorten and reduce the cost of planning the synthesis of new chemical compounds used in medicines.

How the Maria platform works

Molecule.one's system doesn't stop at generating proposed synthesis routes on paper. The company runs an autonomous lab in Warsaw where machines carry out thousands of experiments without human involvement, continuously checking whether the AI models' predictions hold up in practice. The lab operates at a scale of 12,000 experiments per week, allowing it to quickly gather data and train subsequent versions of the models.

This combination of software and a physical lab sets Molecule.one apart from many competitors that offer only computational tools. Thanks to its own experimental data, the company can verify the accuracy of its models and continuously improve their performance, rather than relying solely on publicly available chemical datasets.

Breakthrough with OpenAI

The company considers one of its biggest achievements in recent months to be a project run together with OpenAI to improve the yield of the Chan-Lam reaction, widely used in the pharmaceutical industry. Over 2.5 months, 10,080 reactions were carried out, and the model proposed using the TEMPO oxidant, which increased the reaction yield for 80 percent of the tested substrates, and for half of them the yield even doubled.

This is an absolute milestone for us. It illustrates well that the most effective way to predict how technology will develop is to create it yourself - Piotr Byrski, CEO of Molecule.one

Investors and clients

Molecule.one has raised a total of around 40 million zloty from grants and investors, including the funds Sunfish Partners, Expeditions Fund, AME Cloud Ventures and Outsized Ventures. Business angels backing the company include Mati Staniszewski, co-founder of ElevenLabs, and Marcin Żukowski, co-creator of Snowflake.

The company's clients include the American chemical group W.R. Grace, with which Molecule.one signed a contract worth one million dollars. Cooperation with major players in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries is expected to be the main driver of further revenue growth in the coming years.

Plans for 2026

For 2026, Molecule.one is planning to further expand its team by more than 10 new employees, develop labs both in Poland and in the United States, and raise another funding round. The company's management makes no secret that repeating last year's threefold sales growth is an ambitious goal, but treats it as a realistic baseline scenario rather than an upper limit.

For the Polish AI market, Molecule.one's story shows that homegrown startups can build real commercial revenue in a sector where most players are still financed mainly through investment rounds. The company competes with international players valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, relying on a combination of its own experimental data and language models trained for chemistry tasks.

The AI sector in drug discovery is also accelerating globally, with major players such as OpenAI and Anthropic increasingly getting directly involved in research projects in chemistry and biology. Molecule.one's collaboration with OpenAI shows that Polish research teams can become partners in such projects rather than just recipients of their output.