Phylo Unveils Biomni Lab and Seed Round co-led by A16Z and Menlo

Phylo, collaborative agents designed for biologists to make more discoveries, faster, led by Kexin Huang, Yuanhao Qu, Jure Leskovec, Le Cong, and others, has announced Biomni Lab and a seed funding of $13.5 million co-led by a16z and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund with Anthropic. Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel, Valkyrie also supported, along with world-class angel investors.

Scientists pursue biology to understand life and eliminate disease, yet fragmented, manual workflows continue to slow discovery.

Launched at Stanford in June 2024, Biomni is an open-source AI agent designed to execute day-to-day biomedical research tasks, enabling focus on breakthrough science. Adoption quickly followed, with tens of thousands of scientists across 7,000+ labs, biopharma companies, and healthcare organizations using the platform.

This momentum signaled an inflection point for biomedical intelligence. With Phylo, Biomni is now being scaled to support biologists working at the frontier of discovery.

Phylo is an applied research lab focused on bringing advanced agentic intelligence to biomedical science and dramatically increasing researcher productivity.

The work spans three areas. Research advances agentic systems for biomedicine through open-source efforts, academic collaborations, and ongoing work on open-weight agents, real-world evaluations, and new biomedical capabilities enabled by agents, while continuing to support the Biomni project and community. Product development centers on the Integrated Biology Environment (IBE), designing steerable, rigorous, safe, and reliable agents with immediate practical value for scientists. Deployment focuses on scaling the IBE across academia, biotech, pharma, and healthcare through responsible partnerships and real-world adoption.

The founding team brings deep expertise across AI, biology, and software engineering, with leading contributions to AI and biomedical research, including Biomni, POPPER, CRISPR-GPT, TDC, DeepPurpose, ClinicalBERT, GEARS, and TxGNN. Team members have also driven innovation at organizations such as Google, Scale, Factory, Microsoft, Anthropic, Genentech, Pfizer, Benchling, Alector, and Cytoreason.

Biomni Lab is the first realization of AI-native biology through the Integrated Biology Environment. It provides a unified workspace where biologists orchestrate AI agents across disease areas, data modalities, and stages of drug discovery. More than 300 databases, software systems, and analytical tools are integrated into a single environment, alongside connections to proprietary resources such as Consensus, COSMIC, and Addgene, with additional ecosystem integrations underway.

Early users engage with Biomni Lab daily, generating thousands of queries each month. A case study with Ginkgo Bioworks showed acceleration of complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, producing publication-quality results in hours rather than weeks.

Development continues with deeper integrations, more capable agents, and tighter wet-lab feedback loops, advancing toward a future where scientific discovery is limited only by imagination and fundamental physical laws.