C5R builds research facilities for frontier models: physical environments where models can design experiments, operate instruments, learn from results, and be evaluated on real scientific work. We’re starting in life sciences. We brought up our prototype facility in San Francisco in 12 weeks, with capabilities across protein design, medicinal chemistry, and solid-state materials.

Every experimental scientist, inventor, and engineer has a workspace: a lab, workshop, studio, or bench. We believe models will need one too.

In these environments, models might design an experiment, execute a protocol, generate a candidate molecule or material, or diagnose an unexpected result. The physical world supplies the feedback models need to build intuition across its many scales: measurements reveal what worked, what failed, and what holds up when repeated. Where known answers exist, graders can assess correctness; for open-ended work, they can evaluate the model’s methods and decisions.

We build facilities end to end—from site infrastructure and procurement through instrument integration, robotics, software, and operations. By working closely with model developers, we continuously produce the data and physical feedback their models need for pretraining, lab-in-the-loop post-training, and evaluation.

- Justin, Michael, Dante, Ryan, Sohan, Tom, Daisy, Vinny, Adam, Flo, Kyrylo, Richard, Omkar, Tyler, Noela, Stephen, Kellsey