SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif — Phylo, an applied AI research laboratory focused on transforming biological research, announced today the launch of Biomni Lab, an innovative, fully integrated environment designed to accelerate AI-native biology. The platform enables scientists to seamlessly plan, design, execute, and collaborate on complex research projects using advanced agentic AI within a unified workspace.
In conjunction with this launch, Phylo revealed a $13.5 million seed funding round, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund—an AI-focused investment fund created in partnership with Anthropic. The funding also saw participation from notable investors including Zetta, Conviction, and SV Angel.
A Significant Step Forward in AI-Enabled Biological Research
Biomni Lab builds upon an open-source project initially introduced in June 2025, also named Biomni. It marked a breakthrough as the first integrated biology environment (IBE) that combined agentic AI with hundreds of domain-specific tools to create a generalized biomedical AI assistant. Today’s Research Preview of Biomni Lab expands this foundation, offering a robust platform where researchers can orchestrate AI agents reliably, reproducibly, and at scale.
“From my background in AI and computer science, it was clear that AI-native biology would require a new approach,” said Dr. Kexin Huang, Co-founder and CEO of Phylo, and lead author of the original Biomni research paper. “We developed an integrated environment that unites top-tier agent architectures with the tools biologists use daily, delivering productivity gains comparable to AI-supported software engineering.”
Performance and Real-World Impact
Biomni Lab’s new agent architecture demonstrates over 20% performance improvements over existing systems on standard benchmarks and complex, long-term scientific evaluations. It enables scientists to automate routine workflows, troubleshoot experiments, and manage dependencies effortlessly.
“Fragmented workflows and repetitive tasks have long slowed biomedical progress,” said Yuanhao (Jerry) Qu, Ph.D., Co-founder and President of Phylo. “Biomni Lab transforms this landscape by providing a high-performing, expert AI agent that operates 24/7—shrinking weeks-long cycles into minutes while ensuring scientific rigor.”
The platform has already proven its value in real-world applications. In a partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks, Biomni Lab accelerated over ten complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, delivering publication-quality results and reducing workflows from weeks to hours.
“Biomni Lab is user-friendly for scientists to automate bioinformatics, generate publication-ready figures, and compare results with external datasets,” said Ayla Ergun, Senior Director of Data Science at Ginkgo Bioworks. “We aim to incorporate Biomni as a core tool in our daily workflows.”
Rooted in Open Science and Academic Collaboration
Phylo originated from the open-source Biomni project at Stanford, now adopted by over 7,000 labs, biopharma, and healthcare organizations worldwide. The company remains committed to maintaining and advancing the open-source platform, fostering foundational research in agentic AI for biology, and translating innovations into production systems.
Founded by Kexin Huang and Yuanhao Qu, Phylo’s leadership team includes scientific co-founders Jure Leskovec and Le Cong from Stanford, with strategic advisors including Nobel Laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, and computational biology expert Fabian Theis.
Industry Reception and Future Outlook
“User adoption is a key indicator of success,” said Jorge Conde, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Seeing a research project like Biomni reach this level of real-world application is remarkable. Biomni Lab builds on that foundation, bringing Kexin and Yuanhao’s vision into a commercial-grade platform.”
“Phylo is revolutionizing biological research,” added Matt Kraning, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “Their breakthrough agentic AI technology integrated into a productivity platform is set to accelerate discovery and innovation.”
