Phylo, a South San Francisco, CA-based developer of an integrated environment for AI-native biology, has raised $13.5 million in a Seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund (in partnership with Anthropic).
The round also saw participation from Zetta Venture Partners, Conviction, SV Angel, and other investors.
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The company plans to use the funds to expand its production systems, support the Biomni open-source platform, and advance its agentic AI research for biological applications.
Phylo, an applied AI research lab helping biologists work faster, has developed Biomni Lab’s new agent architecture, which outperforms existing AI systems by over 20% on standard benchmarks and real-world scientific tasks.
“Biomni Lab, now available in research preview, is a major advancement over earlier work. Originally launched in June 2025 as the open-source project Biomni, it was the first integrated biology environment combining agentic AI, with hundreds of specialised tools to create a general biomedical AI agent. Biomni Lab unites the latest AI agent with an expanded environment, giving scientists a single platform to run agents reliably, reproducibly, and at scale.”
“Kexin Huang, PhD, Co-founder and CEO of Phylo and first author of the original Biomni paper, said, ‘With my background in computer science and AI, it was clear that AI-native biology needed a completely new approach. We created an integrated environment that combines advanced AI agents with the tools biologists actually use, boosting productivity in ways similar to what I’ve seen with AI in software engineering.’
“Yuanhao (Jerry) Qu, PhD, Co-founder and President of Phylo, said, ‘Over the past decade, I’ve seen how fragmented workflows and repetitive tasks slow biomedical research—from recreating experiments to debugging scripts and managing tool dependencies. Biomni Lab changes that by providing a high-performing AI agent available 24/7 to handle these tasks, turning week-long processes into minutes while keeping scientific rigour.’
Biomni Lab has already shown real-world impact. In a case study with Ginkgo Bioworks, it sped up over 10 complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses. Ginkgo scientists validated the results as publication-quality, cutting workflows that usually take weeks down to just hours.
“Ayla Ergun, Senior Director of Data Science at Ginkgo Bioworks, said, ‘Phylo’s Biomni Lab platform is easy for scientists to use for automating bioinformatics analyses, creating publication-quality figures, and comparing results with external datasets. At Ginkgo Datapoints, we plan to make Biomni a regular part of our workflows.”
Phylo grew out of the Biomni open-source project at Stanford, which is now used by over 7,000 labs, biopharma, and healthcare organizations. The company will continue supporting the Biomni open-source platform and community, advancing open research in agentic AI for biology while applying those innovations to practical production systems.
“Ayla Ergun, Senior Director of Data Science at Ginkgo Bioworks, said, ‘Phylo’s Biomni Lab platform is easy for scientists to use for automating bioinformatics analyses, creating publication-quality figures, and comparing results with external datasets. At Ginkgo Datapoints, we plan to make Biomni a regular part of our workflows.”
“Phylo grew out of the Biomni open-source project at Stanford, which is now used by over 7,000 labs, biopharma, and healthcare organizations. The company will continue supporting the Biomni open-source platform and community, advancing open research in agentic AI for biology while applying those innovations to practical production systems.”
About Phylo
Founded by CEO Kexin Huang, PhD, and President Yuanhao Qu, PhD, Phylo has launched Biomni Lab. This AI-powered workspace helps scientists plan and carry out complex research tasks using agentic AI.
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