Phylo announced it has launched Biomni Lab, a new integrated workspace designed to help scientists plan, author, execute, and collaborate on complex biological research tasks using agentic AI. Alongside the product launch, the company announced a $13.5 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, with Anthropic also participating. Additional investors cited by the company include Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel, and others.
Phylo positioned Biomni Lab as an “AI-native biology” platform built to address the fragmented, tool-heavy workflows that slow research, especially as teams increasingly combine computational and wet-lab work. The company said Biomni Lab brings the latest version of its agent together with an expanded environment in a single place, enabling scientists to orchestrate agents “reliably, reproducibly, and at scale,” rather than stitching together scripts, dependencies, and point tools across multiple systems.
The company framed Biomni Lab as the commercial-grade evolution of its earlier work on Biomni, an open-source project introduced in June 2025 that it described as the first integrated biology environment to combine agentic AI with hundreds of domain-specific tools to create a generalized biomedical AI agent. Phylo said it will continue to maintain the open-source Biomni platform and community while translating advances from open research into production systems through Biomni Lab.
Phylo also highlighted performance claims and early deployment outcomes as proof points. The company said Biomni Lab’s new agent architecture delivers state-of-the-art performance and outperforms existing agent systems by more than 20% across standard benchmarks and long-horizon scientific evaluations. It also cited a case study with Ginkgo Bioworks, saying Biomni Lab accelerated more than 10 complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, producing publication-quality results validated by Ginkgo scientists and reducing workflows that typically take weeks to hours.
Strategically, the company is aiming to become a foundational layer for modern biological work in the same way integrated development environments transformed software engineering productivity. Phylo’s founders described the vision as creating a unified environment that combines modern agent architectures with the tools biologists actually use, compressing repetitive tasks and setup-heavy work while preserving scientific rigor. The product is intended to provide a persistent expert agent that can assist around the clock with common pain points such as rebuilding experimental setups, debugging scripts, and managing dependencies across specialized tools.
The announcement also emphasized the company’s academic pedigree and advisory bench as part of its credibility narrative. Phylo said it is led by Stanford AI and biology researchers Kexin Huang and Yuanhao (Jerry) Qu, with scientific co-founders including Stanford professors Jure Leskovec and Le Cong. The company also listed founding and scientific advisors from industry and academia, including Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi and CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, among others.
Biomni Lab is available in a research preview, and the company said it is accessible online while also inviting integration partners and enterprises to engage directly as it expands deployments.
KEY QUOTES
“Coming from computer science and AI research, it was clear that AI-native biology was going to require an entirely new approach. We built an integrated environment to unify the best of agent architectures with the tools biologists actually use, delivering extraordinary gains in their productivity, similar to what I’ve experienced with AI-supported software engineering.”
Kexin Huang, Co-Founder And Chief Executive Officer, Phylo
“For the past decade in biomedical research, I’ve seen how much scientific progress is slowed by fragmented workflows and repetitive work—from recreating experimental setups with every new experiment, to debugging scripts and wrangling dependencies across tools. Biomni Lab changes that. It introduces a new way of working in biology, where a high performing, expert agent is available 24/7 to assist with these everyday tasks—compressing week-long cycles into minutes while maintaining scientific rigor.”
Yuanhao (Jerry) Qu, Co-Founder And President, Phylo
“Phylo’s Biomni Lab platform is user-friendly for all scientists to automate bioinformatics analyses, generate publication-quality figures, and even compare results with external datasets. At Ginkgo Datapoints, we hope to incorporate Biomni as an everyday tool in our workflows.”
Ayla Ergun, Senior Director Of Data Science, Ginkgo Bioworks
“User adoption is one of the strongest signals that we look for. It’s rare, especially in the life sciences, to see an academic research project reach this level of real-world usage and sustained user love. Biomni Lab builds on that strong foundation as the first incarnation of Kexin and Yuanhao’s much more ambitious, commercial-grade product vision.”
Jorge Conde, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
“Phylo is fundamentally changing the way biological research happens. Kexin and Yuanhao have built breakthrough agentic AI technology and integrated it into a platform that brings AI-native productivity to the lab. We’re excited to support the team as they accelerate discovery.”
Matt Kraning, Partner, Menlo Ventures
