Medra, the San Francisco startup building autonomous “robot scientists” that can run and interpret lab experiments, has locked in a full-building headquarters lease in SoMa, taking roughly 38,000 square feet. The deal puts Medra in the growing club of lab-focused AI tenants grabbing serious space in the city. Company leaders say the new campus is slated to host robotic workcells, larger engineering teams and a sizeable autonomous lab operation.
According to CoStar, Medra has signed for the entire building at 1301 Folsom Street and was represented by JLL brokers Brittan Hawken and Jack Nelson. Public records and property listings put the building at about 38,042 square feet, as noted by LoopNet, and its footprint and layout are seen as a natural fit for robotics infrastructure and lab buildouts.
What Medra Builds
Medra describes its product as Physical AI: robotic workcells tied to reasoning models that can design, execute and refine experiments with far less human babysitting than a traditional lab. The company has announced a $52 million Series A round and partnerships with companies including Genentech as it ramps up an autonomous lab, according to Bloomberg.
1301 Folsom's Past And Suitability
The property at 1301 Folsom is marketed as a SoMa flex and industrial building, with high clear heights and drive-in bays that brokers say make robotics and lab installations easier to engineer, according to its listing on LoopNet. The address has some recent history in the tech and science world as well: it previously served as the San Francisco headquarters for Molekule, which later became embroiled in financial and lease disputes, as reported by The San Francisco Standard.
How It Fits The Bigger Picture
Medra’s move lands in the middle of a broader wave of AI and life science leasing that is quietly reshaping San Francisco’s office market, from large downtown consolidations to more modest SoMa lab conversions. Recent tower-scale commitments by AI firms downtown have sent a similar signal about demand for contiguous, purpose-built space, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Industry observers say landlords are increasingly open to tenants that need hybrid lab-and-engineering footprints, and Medra’s own announcements describe plans to build out a large autonomous lab while hiring across hardware, software and operations, per Medra. That blend of robotics capability with wet-lab capacity lines up neatly with what SoMa landlords and brokers say they have been hearing more of this year.
The lease at 1301 Folsom will not change San Francisco’s skyline overnight, but it adds another data point to a market where capital, talent and specialized space are cautiously flowing back in. For SoMa neighbors, the most visible changes will likely be lab buildouts, construction crews and a fresh wave of technical hiring moving onto the block.
