The 2025 Climate Leaders to Watch

The scientific process can be painstakingly slow. Jon Hennek is working to speed it up at Lila Sciences. Lila’s goal is to perform cutting-edge research in sustainability and life sciences, with Hennek driving the use of artificial intelligence to develop catalysts and materials key to the energy transition.

Over the last two-and-a-half years, the company has investigated millions of materials using AI and tested the most promising ones in the lab. That includes testing the efficacy of novel sorbents used to capture carbon from air, a technology needed to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

While it’s hard to say exactly how much time AI saves, Hennek says the pace of the work feels dramatically different from an all-human lab, where the process of gathering relevant research, creating a hypothesis, setting up an experiment and running it for a single material can take months or even years.

“What Lila is trying to do is fundamentally accelerate the entire wheel of science, not just finding how to do parts of it better,” he says. The company emerged from stealth mode earlier this year with $200 million in funding.

Before Lila, Hennek worked at Osmo, a company spun out of Google attempting to teach AI to develop a sense of smell, which could have medical applications. Prior to that, he worked on software that helped farmers implement carbon-sequestering practices. Getting back to his roots by focusing on emission cuts, Hennek says, is what drew him to Lila.