Pluto Bio, a leading AI-based platform for computational biology, announced it has raised $3.6 million in new funding to accelerate growth and scale adoption of its enterprise-grade platform among global pharma companies. The funding round includes participation from new investor Kickstart and existing investor Silverton Partners and angel investors.
What Pluto does: Pluto’s platform serves as the industry’s most powerful “canvas for computational biology,” which is a secure, collaborative environment where scientists at therapeutics companies explore large, high-dimensional datasets, run auto-scaling bioinformatics pipelines, and generate publication-ready visualizations tailored to their specific scientific questions without writing code. And as large language models (LLMs) reshape drug discovery and development, Pluto is at the forefront of empowering biology and translational medicine teams to harness AI in a manner that complements the vital insights from human scientists.
Pluto enables scientists to run proprietary analyses on both public datasets like The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE), and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and internal raw data using industry-validated, auto-scaling pipelines built for scale, security, and reproducibility. Plus, scientists use Pluto for critical steps in early-mid drug discovery, such as target discovery, mechanism of action (MoA) studies, translational medicine, and biomarkers/precision medicine research. This platform supports the wide range of assays used for investigating targets and biomarkers, including genomics, transcriptomics, epigenetics, and proteomics.
This platform is trusted by mid-market and enterprise clients across North America and Europe, with users spanning discovery biology, translational research, and computational teams. As a collaborative layer over drug discovery data infrastructure, Pluto integrates seamlessly into existing scientific workflows and supports data governance needs for regulated environments.
What the funding will be used for: The new funding round will support continued development of Pluto’s AI agents and copilots, expansion of integrations with other R&D tools, enable build-out of commercial roles, and accelerate deployment across therapeutic areas and modalities.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is transforming how we interrogate biology. What impressed us about Pluto is how it puts the power of LLMs into the hands of domain expert scientists – biologists, translational researchers, and discovery teams – by giving them an instantly intuitive interface for expressing scientific questions faster and in a way that increases scientific rigor and reproducibility.”
Dalton Wright, General Partner at Kickstart
“With this funding, we’re fueling our mission to make high-dimensional biological data accessible to the people who deeply understand the underlying biology and unmet therapeutic needs. Teams using Pluto are already demonstrating that innovation in drug discovery accelerates when scientists can directly generate insights from complex data. Our platform was built to make that vision real, whether for a team of ten scientists or an enterprise organization with hundreds.”
Dr. Rani Powers, Founder and CEO of Pluto
