Last month, during SLAS 2026 in Boston, Atinary officially opened its Self-Driving Labs® facility in the Boston Seaport. While our recent announcement detailed the technical specifications of the facility, the atmosphere on the ground was about something deeper: the realization of a decade-long vision. Over 200 scientists, R&D leaders, and partners toured the Atinary Lab during the week to witness something that, until recently, existed only as a vision: AI operating not in simulation, but in the physical reality of the lab, augmenting humans to designing experiments, executed autonomously by robots, and learning from every result in a Design-Make-Test-Analyzed + Learn (DMTA+L) closed loop.
A new paradigm launched in Boston
Atinary is revolutionizing the centuries-old, manual, human-driven trial-and-error process of scientific discovery. The Atinary Lab in Boston changes the paradigm of how science is done: it operates as a continuous learning flywheel where AI directs the experiments, robots execute them, and results are analyzed and fed instantly back into the system to learn and decide on the next best experiments. Operating around the clock, the Atinary Lab can generate more experiments in one week than a PhD in 5 years using traditional methods, a PhD per week!
Image description: The Atinary Lab in Boston houses two smart robotic platforms that can execute Physical AI-driven experiments in full autonomy, in self-driving mode. Both systems are fully integrated with and orchestrated by Atinary’s code-free AI platform, SDLabs. For one platform, Atinary partnered with Chemspeed to fully integrate SDLabs with a Flex iSynth robotic system fully with an inline NMR from Bruker. On the other platform, Atinary partnered with ABB Robotics as our world-class systems integrator to deploy two ABB robotic arms, integrated with Mettler-Toledo’s precision instruments and Agilent’s Open Bed Sample Fraction Collector (OBS/C) and Liquid Chromatography and Mass Spectrometer (LC-MS) .
As pioneers of Self-Driving Labs, a term Co-Founders Dr. Hermann Tribukait and Dr. Loïc Roch coined in 2017, Atinary leveraged its experience and expertise, plus a global ecosystem we have built over nearly a decade to execute on the Self-Driving Labs vision, and reach this milestone. The two autonomous platforms in the Atinary Lab do not replace scientists. They augment scientists to leverage humans’ creativity, ingenuity and imagination. Self-Driving Labs free them from doing manual, repetitive, and mundane tasks to focus on the more exciting and challenging tasks and spend most of their time on science.
“It’s really hard to believe that what we started as a dream now became a reality.”
Dr. Loïc Roch, Co-Founder and CTO, Atinary
Highlights from the Self-Driving Labs® Grand Opening
The week featured exclusive lab tours, giving over 200 visitors a firsthand look at Atinary’s Scientific Data Factories in action. Here are a few key takeaways:
- AI-driven Execution: Atinary’s AI engine, SDLabs, suggests experiments and sends the instructions to the robotic system that will execute the entire workflow fully automatically, from automated weighing and reaction workup to synthesis, test, characterization, and analysis.
- Continuous Learning: Results from experiments are instantly fed back to fine-tune the AI models, which then suggests the best next set of optimal experiments. The models improve with each iteration, and suggestions become better with each experiment. This continuous learning flywheel allows scientists to focus most of their time on science.
- Current Focus: The platform is focused on small molecule synthesis and catalysis, specifically on key chemical reactions like Buchwald-Hartwig and Suzuki couplings.
Image description: Highlights from the Atinary Lab tours, welcoming scientists and innovators to explore the future of autonomous discovery. We were honored to celebrate alongside our Scientific Advisor, MIT Prof. Stephen Buchwald. His foundational work in palladium- and copper-catalyzed bond formation, spanning over 550 papers and 55 patents, provides the chemical framework as we now run Buchwald-Hartwig reactions in our Self-Driving Lab in full autonomy.
Building the Atinary Lab and fully integrating AI, robotics, lab equipment, software, and science, required a multidisciplinary team and a rich ecosystem of partners, collaborators, advisors, and believers. The Atinary Lab stands as a testament to what is possible with strong leadership, collaboration, and imagination.
“It truly takes a village. In addition to the extraordinary Atinary Team of 30 across Boston, Lausanne, and Menlo Park, plus our scientific advisors and investors, we had more than 60 colleagues from our partners and ecosystem actively working with us to design and build this lab.”
Dr.Hermann Tribukait, Co-Founder and CEO, Atinary
Atinary is building the new standard for R&D: Self-Driving Labs® that augments scientists with artificial intelligence and robotics into a single continuously learning system. By augmenting human intelligence and removing the bottlenecks of human-driven processes, Atinary transforms R&D from isolated experimentation into a compounding engine for exponential discovery.
The Era of Exponential Science is here
Following a successful launch of our new Boston lab, Atinary continues to accelerate its mission to power the next generation of R&D. Our AI solutions compress R&D timelines from years to weeks, exponentially increasing the productivity of scientists and freeing them to focus on the creative process.
R&D Leaders and Scientists: To learn more about our AI-driven solutions or explore how our Self-Driving Labs® technologies can integrate with your projects: