Tetsuwan Scientific is a San Francisco company founded in 2023 by Cristian Ponce (CEO) and Theo Schafer (CTO), who met through Entrepreneur First's U.S. program. Ponce came from biological engineering at Caltech, where he worked on full-genome engineering; Schafer holds a master's in mechanical engineering from ETH Zurich with thesis work at MIT. The company builds what it calls autonomous AI scientists: software and sensors layered onto lower-cost white-label lab robots so that the system can handle calibration, liquid-class characterization and other physical properties, evaluate experimental results, and modify subsequent runs without human oversight. Rather than building proprietary hardware from scratch, Tetsuwan modifies existing liquid-handling robots, reducing capital requirements. Its first autonomous system was deployed in a rare-disease gene therapeutics lab, and its early alpha customer was La Jolla Labs, a biotech developing RNA therapeutics. The team is advised by Aaron Kimball, former CTO of Zymergen and Director of Engineering at Benchling, and has drawn staff from Caltech, ETH Zurich, MIT and UC Davis.
Funding
Tetsuwan Scientific closed an oversubscribed $2.7 million pre-seed round announced in late 2024, led by 2048 Ventures with participation from Carbon Silicon, Everywhere Ventures and angel investors including Sonia Arrison of the Foresight Institute and Eduardo Torrealba of Formlabs.