---
title: 'Business Operations at Medra'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-operations-medra-san-francisco-j4m093qj67dv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-08'
---

# Business Operations at Medra

- **Company:** Medra
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-07-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-08
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai/13e93fc3-fd20-4e7c-a748-00ccbc2a7f79

## Job description

WHAT ARE WE DOING?

Medra’s mission is to eradicate disease.

## WHAT WE'RE BUILDING:

We have been quietly building the foundational layers of our Physical AI Scientist platform: 🤖 Physical AI that can operate scientific instruments with human-level dexterity. 🧪 Scientific AI that can analyze results, reason about next steps, and close the loop autonomously.

This is an incredibly ambitious mission, but we believe that a team of ambitious people with high ownership can accomplish incredible things.

## THE TEAM:

- We’re a team of passionate, mission-driven people from companies like Tesla, Applied Intuition, SpaceX, Neuralink, Scale, Samsara, and Vercel. We’re collaborative and committed to moving fast with extreme prioritization.
- Our team is opinionated and straightforward. We don’t mind intense discussions about tradeoffs. If we have arguments or miscommunication, we resolve conflicts quickly and empathetically. Feedback of all types is not just welcome, but expected.
- As a team, we’re always looking for ways to grow and improve. We love learning new things and then sharing our new knowledge with each other.

## BIZOPS AT MEDRA:

This is a 0→1 role at the center of a company scaling fast. This is not a support role. You are the operational infrastructure the team runs on. Every system you build, every workflow you automate, every fire you put out makes the entire company faster. When something falls through the cracks, you're the person who notices, owns it, and ships a fix before anyone has to ask.

We're a startup doing the work of a company five times our size. There are no established playbooks. If you're looking for defined processes and clear swim lanes, this isn't the right fit. If you see a room full of broken workflows, missing systems, and a half-built CRM and your first instinct is to start fixing things, keep reading.

## RESPONSIBILITIES

- Business Operations: Own day-to-day business operations and keep the company running while it scales.
- Process Improvement: Dig into cross-functional pain points, find root causes, and fix the underlying systems, not just the symptoms. You'll touch finance, hiring, customer success, and ops, often in the same week.
- Go-to-Market and Sales Support: Step into sales and GTM on short notice. Pitch decks, prospect pipelines, outbound messaging, collateral. Whatever the Sales/GTM/BD team needs to move faster.
- Automation and Systems: Build automations and kill manual work. You're AI-native and you treat every repetitive process as a problem to solve.
- Special Projects: Take on special projects that are high-value, loosely scoped, and need someone who can figure it out without being told how.

## REQUIREMENTS

- 1-3 years in consulting, finance, product, or business development, or you're early-career with a steep slope and a track record of shipping real work.
- You do what you say you're going to do, on time, every time. No task is beneath you and no problem is someone else's.
- You don't wait for structure. You create it. You've built a process, a tool, or a system from nothing because you saw the gap and couldn't leave it alone.
- You operate fast. You'd rather ship something 80% right today and iterate than spend a week perfecting a plan.
- Direct communicator. You take feedback without flinching and give it without hedging.

## BONUS POINTS FOR:

- You've worked in ops at a high-growth startup and know what "scaling while everything is on fire" actually feels like.
- Background in math, statistics, engineering, or science.
- You've built internal knowledge bases or automations that saved your team real hours every week.

This position is 100% in-person, you must be able to come on-site to our San Francisco office. We offer relocation benefits for applicants who need to relocate.

## WHAT WE OFFER

- An opportunity to fundamentally change the way that scientific research happens
- Fast-paced, creative, and collaborative work environment
- Significant equity ownership
- 401k
- Medical insurance and dental Insurance
- Unlimited PTO
- Weekday lunches and dinners

## About Medra

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Building autonomous Physical AI for the lab to accelerate scientific discovery by executing and optimizing experiments in a closed loop.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series A)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States (340 Pine Street, Suite 100)
- **Founded**: 2021 (some sources cite 2022 – conflicting reports)
- **Founders**: Michelle Lee (CEO)

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Life sciences automation, laboratory robotics, AI-driven experimental design
- **Target customers**: B2B – biopharma companies, academic research labs, government agencies (e.g., DARPA)
- **Mission / purpose**: Unlock breakthroughs at scale by tightly integrating AI scientific reasoning with physical experimentation.

## Products & Services
- **Physical AI Lab (Medra Lab 001 – ML001)**: A fully autonomous robotic workcell that executes wet-lab protocols (e.g., CRISPR, cell culture, NGS) using computer vision and robotic manipulation. Instrument-agnostic and modular.
- **AI Experimentalist**: The scientific reasoning layer that translates natural-language research goals into executable experiment plans, coordinates multi-step protocols, analyzes results, and refines methods in a closed loop.
- **Platform Type**: Physical AI + Scientific AI as a service (on-site deployment or remote operation via ML001).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation / Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total funding of $63M (Series A of $52M closed December 2025, preceded by $11M pre-seed in October 2025 and a non-equity assistance from PharmStars in 2023)
- **Notable Investors / Partners**: Human Capital (lead), Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Catalio Capital, Neo, 776 (Seven Seven Six), Fusion Fund, Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross
- **Growth Signals**:
  - Headcount grew 100% YoY (31 employees as of mid-2026)
  - Launched ML001 in San Francisco (April 2026) — largest autonomous lab in the U.S.
  - Announced DARPA collaboration (June 2026) to advance natural-language-to-executable-experiment capabilities
  - 8 open positions across biology, engineering, design, and operations

## Competitive Advantages
- **Closed-loop integration**: Combines physical execution with AI-driven experimental design and learning – not just robotic task automation.
- **Instrument-agnostic & modular**: Works with both manual and automated lab instruments, allowing easy swapping of modules and protocols.
- **Natural-language programming**: Scientists can edit protocols in plain English (written or voice).
- **Scalable data generation**: Logs every action, video, and metadata per sample for traceability and model training.

## Strategic Focus
- Expand partnerships with biopharma, academia, and government (DARPA is a key early customer).
- Advance the AI Experimentalist layer to enable full autonomous hypothesis generation and validation.
- Scale deployments of Physical AI Labs on-site and remotely through ML001.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as “intense curiosity and rigorous debate” with clear, direct communication and quick resolution of conflicts through mutual respect.
- **Team**: Community of diverse thinkers, “not just a company but a movement to transform biotechnology.”
- **Work policy**: Likely on-site at the San Francisco lab given the nature of physical robotics; no explicit remote/hybrid policy mentioned.
- **Perks & highlights**: Opportunity to work on cutting-edge AI + robotics with a high-impact mission; funded by top-tier VCs; strong engineering culture (43% technical staff, many from Neuralink, Applied Intuition, Amazon, Carnegie Mellon).

## Sources
1. [medra.ai](https://www.medra.ai/)
2. [medra.ai/careers](https://www.medra.ai/careers)
3. [linkedin.com/company/medra-ai](https://www.linkedin.com/company/medra-ai)
4. [cbinsights.com/company/medra](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/medra)
5. [medra.ai/darpa-collaboration](https://www.medra.ai/darpa-collaboration)
6. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/medraai)

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