Scientists pursue biology because they are driven by a desire to understand life and eliminate disease. But the daily reality is an obstacle course of heterogeneous tasks executed through fragmented, manual workflows, preventing researchers from operating at the speed and scale that discovery demands.

We were early believers that AI presented an opportunity to change that. In June 2024, we started Biomni at Stanford—an open-source, general-purpose AI agent that handles the execution of day-to-day biomedical research tasks so scientists can focus on what matters: making breakthrough discoveries. It was our first step towards proving what an agentic future for science could look like.

What happened next confirmed our early belief. Tens of thousands of scientists across 7,000+ research labs, biopharma companies, and healthcare organizations adopted Biomni. We later built our first reinforcement learning (RL) agent and pushed across a diverse spectrum of tasks—from optimizing drug candidates,, commanding lab robotics, and designing experiments—to show what's actually possible.

The response signaled an inflection point for biomedical intelligence. Now, with Phylo, we're scaling what we set out to build—delivering Biomni to every biologist ready to work at the frontier.

About Phylo

Phylo is an applied research lab. Our mission is to bring the best agentic intelligence to every biomedical scientist, and make them extraordinarily more productive. 

We do three things:

Research. We’re pushing the frontier of agentic research for biomedicine and demonstrating what’s possible with deep experience and a nuanced context of biology. This includes continued open-source research and collaborations with academic groups at Stanford and beyond. We have three ongoing directions—training next generation open-weight agents, building real-world evals, and exploring novel biomedical capabilities that can be unlocked by agents. We will also maintain the Biomni open source research project and support the Biomni community. 

Product. We summarize our initial product vision into a new term called the Integrated Biology Environment (IBE) (read more here). We design and build products that bring this vision to life. Our work centers on scientist-AI interaction—designing agents that are steerable, rigorous, safe, and reliable. Our core principle is pragmatism: the north star is of immediate usefulness for every biomedical scientist. We put scientists first, and innovate fast to place the latest agentic research into their hands. 

Deployment. We're building towards a future where the IBE reaches every scientist in academia, biotechs, pharma, and healthcare settings. We're deploying now, partnering with leading organizations to make agents and the IBE useful in a responsible way. 

To achieve our vision, we’ve brought deep expertise across AI, biology, and software engineering together. Our founding team is at the forefront of AI and biomedicine research including Biomni, POPPER, CRISPR-GPT, TDC, DeepPurpose, ClinicalBERT, GEARS, TxGNN; we have innovated at Google, Scale, Factory, Microsoft, Anthropic, Genentech, Pfizer, Benchling, Alector, and Cytoreason. 

We've also partnered with investors who believe in this future as much as we do.

Our $13.5 million seed round was co-led by a16z and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund with Anthropic. Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel, Valkyrie also supported, along with world-class angel investors. We are also excited to welcome scientific advisors Carolyn Bertozzi, Feng Zhang, Fabian Theis, leading figures in biochemistry, genomics, and computational biology, respectively, to guide our scientific direction. 

About Biomni Lab, the first Integrated Biology Environment (IBE)

We are excited to launch a preview of Biomni Lab, our first realization of AI-native biology through the IBE. Biomni Lab is a workspace where biologists orchestrate AI agents to do real work—across disease areas, biomedical data modalities, and drug discovery stages. Over 300 databases, software systems, and analytical tools are integrated into a single environment. Biomni Lab also connects to proprietary tools and data providers, including Consensus for large-scale academic literature access, COSMIC for cancer genomics data, and Addgene for plasmid discovery. Additional ecosystem integrations—such as experimental services and knowledge graphs—are underway to unlock new capabilities of the IBE.

Our alpha users are using Biomni Lab every single day, already sending thousands of queries a month, proving that the IBE is an environment you live in to do day-to-day work. A case study with Ginkgo Bioworks demonstrated it accelerated over 10 complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, yielding publication-quality results validated by Ginkgo scientists, cutting typical weeks-long workflows down to hours (read more in our partner blog post here).

We’re just getting started 

In the coming months, we'll be expanding Biomni Lab's capabilities—deeper integrations, more powerful agents, tighter wet lab loops—while continuing to push open research that benefits the entire community. We're building toward a future where discoveries are abundant, limited by the imagination of our users (and the laws of the universe).

If that future excites you, come join our movement. We would love to hear from you. 

To learn more:

• Try Biomni Lab for free today at biomni.phylo.bio

• The Integrated Biology Environment: Our Vision

• Exclusive with Endpoint News

• Our partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks

Launch events

We're hosting launch events. Sign up to meet us and learn more in person or online! (In person events will feature a Biomni Lab demo, swag, food, drinks, and good conversation.) Stay tuned for more cities! 

• South San Francisco

• Virtual

We’re hiring!

Check out open positions at our Careers page.