Phylo Launches Biomni Lab and Secures $13.5M Seed Round

SAN FRANCISCO, CA | February 3, 2026

Phylo today announced its launch alongside Biomni Lab, the first Integrated Biology Environment (IBE), and revealed a $13.5 million seed financing co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures through the Anthology Fund with Anthropic. Additional investors include Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel, Valkyrie, and a group of leading angel investors.

Phylo is an applied research lab focused on bringing agentic AI to biomedical science. Its mission is to make every biologist dramatically more productive by transforming how research is planned, executed, and interpreted.

From Open Research to an AI-Native Biology Platform

Phylo’s origins trace back to Biomni, an open-source, general-purpose AI agent for biomedical research launched in June 2024 at Stanford. Designed to automate day-to-day scientific tasks, Biomni quickly gained adoption across more than 7,000 research labs, biopharma companies, and healthcare organizations.

Building on this momentum, Phylo advanced agentic capabilities across drug discovery, experimental design, lab automation, and data analysis, demonstrating that AI agents can operate across real, end-to-end scientific workflows. These results marked a clear inflection point for applied biomedical intelligence.

Introducing Biomni Lab, the First Integrated Biology Environment

Biomni Lab is Phylo’s first commercial realization of the Integrated Biology Environment. It is an AI-native workspace where scientists orchestrate multiple agents to perform real research work across disease areas, data modalities, and stages of discovery.

The platform integrates more than 300 biomedical databases, software tools, and analytical systems into a single environment. It also connects to proprietary resources, including Consensus for academic literature, COSMIC for cancer genomics, and Addgene for plasmid discovery. Additional integrations with experimental services and knowledge graphs are currently in development.

Early users are actively running thousands of queries per month, using Biomni Lab as a daily research environment rather than a point solution.

In a case study with Ginkgo Bioworks, Biomni Lab accelerated more than ten complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, producing publication-quality results validated by Ginkgo scientists and reducing workflows that typically take weeks down to hours.

Phylo’s Research, Product, and Deployment Strategy

Phylo operates across three tightly linked pillars:

Research
Phylo advances agentic AI for biomedicine through open and applied research. Ongoing efforts include training next-generation open-weight agents, developing real-world evaluation frameworks, and exploring new scientific capabilities unlocked by agentic systems. The company will continue to maintain and support the Biomni open-source project.

Product
Phylo introduced the concept of the Integrated Biology Environment to describe a new class of AI-native scientific tooling. Its products emphasize rigorous, steerable, safe, and reliable scientist-AI interaction, with a pragmatic focus on immediate usefulness in real research settings.

Deployment
Phylo is actively deploying Biomni Lab across academia, biotech, pharma, and healthcare organizations, partnering with leading institutions to ensure responsible and effective adoption.

Team, Advisors, and Vision

Phylo’s founding team brings deep experience across AI, biology, and software engineering, with prior work spanning leading research systems such as Biomni, POPPER, CRISPR-GPT, TDC, DeepPurpose, ClinicalBERT, GEARS, and TxGNN, as well as industry experience at Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Genentech, Pfizer, Benchling, Alector, Cytoreason, and others.

The company is advised by leading scientists Carolyn Bertozzi, Feng Zhang, and Fabian Theis, who will help guide Phylo’s scientific direction.

Looking Ahead

Over the coming months, Phylo plans to expand Biomni Lab with deeper integrations, more powerful agents, and tighter feedback loops between computational and wet-lab work, while continuing to invest in open research that benefits the broader scientific community.

Phylo is building toward a future where the pace of discovery is constrained only by scientific imagination and fundamental physical limits.