Phylo
Stanford, US · 22 employees on LinkedIn · 8 known investors
Phylo is an applied research lab studying agentic AI to accelerate biomedical discoveries for scientists. The company develops AI agents designed to advance how biomedical research is conducted.
Also known as Biomni · Biomni Lab
Founders & leadership
Investors · 8
Also in the syndicate · 2
Funding
SEC filings, press & company announcements- Undisclosed amountSeedFeb 2026 · 2 sources
Andreessen Horowitz (lead), Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund (lead), angel investors, Anthropic, Conviction, SV Angel, Valkyrie, Zetta Venture Partners
Source ↗
Source: company announcements and press reports — follow each round's link for the claim.
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Phylo is an applied AI research lab that develops agentic AI systems for biomedical research. Its product, Biomni Lab, is described by the company as the first "Integrated Biology Environment" (IBE): a unified workspace in which biologists plan, author, execute and collaborate on complex research tasks with AI agents, spanning disease areas, biomedical data modalities and drug discovery stages. Biomni Lab integrates more than 300 databases, software systems and analytical tools, and connects to external data and tool providers including Consensus (academic literature), COSMIC (cancer genomics) and Addgene (plasmid discovery). The company markets the platform around accuracy (clarifying requests, checking reasoning against a biology knowledge graph, and producing traceable references), reproducibility (100+ pre-built agentic workflows with deterministic pipelines), model-agnostic task routing, and single-tenant cloud deployment in which customer data is not used to train models.
Phylo organizes its work into three areas: research (open-source work, academic collaborations at Stanford and elsewhere, training open-weight agents, building real-world evaluations, and exploring new agent-enabled biomedical capabilities), product (designing agents that are steerable, rigorous, safe and reliable within the IBE), and deployment (partnering with academic, biotech, pharma and healthcare organizations). The company states it will continue to maintain the Biomni open-source platform and community alongside its commercial product.
Biomni Lab launched in research preview on February 3, 2026. Reported performance claims include an agent architecture that outperforms existing agent systems by more than 20% across standard benchmarks and long-horizon scientific evaluations. Phylo states it is ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.
Founding story
Co-founders Kexin Huang and Yuanhao (Jerry) Qu started Biomni at Stanford in June 2024 as an open-source, general-purpose AI agent for biomedical research tasks; other coverage dates the open-source project's public introduction to June 2025. Huang, first author of the original Biomni research paper, came from computer science and AI research and had pursued the idea of an AI scientist for nearly a decade; Qu was a Stanford cancer biology PhD student with experimental and computational biology background. Following broad adoption of Biomni, they formed Phylo as a spinout of the Stanford Biomni project to scale the work commercially. Scientific co-founders are Stanford professors Jure Leskovec (computer science) and Le Cong (pathology).
Business model
Phylo commercializes an enterprise-grade agentic software environment (Biomni Lab) for pharma, biotech, academic and healthcare research organizations, while maintaining the underlying Biomni open-source project as a community and adoption funnel. The website lists a pricing page and separate enterprise offering; specific pricing terms are not disclosed in the sources.
Sources indicate a product-led commercial software offering with a free-to-try research preview of Biomni Lab, a published pricing page, and an enterprise track for organizations; no revenue figures or contract terms are disclosed.
Traction
Sources report that the Biomni open-source project is used by more than 7,000 research labs, biopharma companies and healthcare organizations, supporting tens of thousands of scientists; a16z states it has saved millions of research hours. Biomni Lab alpha users were reported to send thousands of queries per month prior to launch. A Ginkgo Bioworks case study reported acceleration of more than 10 cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses with publication-quality, scientist-validated results, compressing weeks-long workflows into hours. The website states Biomni Lab is used by leading pharma, biotech and academic labs.
Latest developments
On February 3, 2026, Phylo emerged publicly with the launch of Biomni Lab in research preview and a $13.5M seed round. The company said it plans to expand Biomni Lab with deeper integrations, more powerful agents and tighter wet-lab loops, to continue open research and maintenance of the Biomni open-source project, and is actively hiring and seeking enterprise and integration partners.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
Phylo positions itself as creating a new category — the Integrated Biology Environment — analogous to what integrated development environments provide for software engineers, Figma for designers and Excel for analysts. Its lead investor frames the opportunity as building an "AI Scientist" orchestration layer, contrasting it with generalist chatbots and agents optimized for dialogue rather than scientific discovery. No direct competitors are named in the sources.
Phylo differentiates on a purpose-built integrated environment for biology rather than a general-purpose chat assistant: agents grounded in a biology knowledge graph with traceable references, deterministic and reproducible pre-built workflows, model-agnostic task routing, single-tenant private deployment with no training on customer data, enterprise security certifications (ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type 2), and a large open-source user base feeding real-world usage feedback back into the system. Its founding team combines AI and biomedicine research credentials (Biomni, POPPER, CRISPR-GPT, TDC, DeepPurpose, ClinicalBERT, GEARS, TxGNN) with industry experience from Google, Scale, Factory, Microsoft, Anthropic, Genentech, Pfizer, Benchling, Alector and Cytoreason, plus scientific advisors Carolyn Bertozzi, Feng Zhang and Fabian Theis and founding advisor Malay Gandhi.
Technology
The core technology is an agentic AI architecture for biomedical research: collaborative agents that clarify user intent, check reasoning against a biology knowledge graph, self-review work with traceable references, and execute over 300 integrated databases, tools and software systems. The platform includes 100+ pre-built agentic workflows with deterministic pipelines for reproducibility and is model-agnostic, dynamically routing tasks across underlying models. The company has also built a reinforcement learning agent applied to tasks including drug candidate optimization, lab robotics control and experiment design, and describes research directions in open-weight agent training and real-world evaluations. Deployment is cloud-first in single-tenant environments; the company reports ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance.
Go-to-market
Phylo built adoption through the open-source Biomni project, which spread organically across academic labs and then into hospitals, biotech and pharma, and is converting that base with a free research-preview product plus an enterprise offering with security, traceability and workflow infrastructure. It pursues named design-partner deployments (for example Ginkgo Bioworks), ecosystem and data-provider integrations, launch events in South San Francisco and virtually, and direct enterprise outreach via contact@phylo.bio.
Biomedical and biology researchers in academia, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare organizations, including both computational and wet-lab scientists.
Geography
Press coverage places Phylo in South San Francisco, California, US, with research roots and continuing academic collaborations at Stanford University; the product is delivered as a cloud service and launch events were held in South San Francisco and virtually.
History
Biomni began at Stanford as an open-source research project (started June 2024 per the company; introduced publicly in June 2025 per press coverage) and was adopted by thousands of labs and organizations. The team subsequently built a reinforcement learning agent covering tasks such as drug candidate optimization, lab robotics and experiment design. On February 3, 2026, Phylo publicly announced itself, launched Biomni Lab in research preview, and disclosed a $13.5 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund with Anthropic, with Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel, Valkyrie and angel investors participating.
Risks & controversies
The sources contain no reported controversies. Notable uncertainties: performance claims (>20% improvement over existing agent systems) and the Ginkgo Bioworks case study results are company-reported; the product is only in research preview; and sources conflict on whether the Biomni open-source project began in June 2024 (company blog) or was introduced in June 2025 (press release and Pulse 2.0).
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Competitors · 1
by search overlap
Companies competing with Phylo for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.
Timeline · 6
launches, deals, and filingsPhylo announced a $13.5 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund (created in partnership with Anthropic), with participation from Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel, Valkyrie and angel investors. Proceeds are intended to scale production systems, maintain the Biomni open-source platform, and advance agentic AI research for biology.
$13.5M source ↗
Biomni Lab connects to proprietary tools and data providers including Consensus for academic literature access, COSMIC for cancer genomics data, and Addgene for plasmid discovery.
A case study with Ginkgo Bioworks reported that Biomni Lab accelerated more than 10 complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, producing publication-quality results validated by Ginkgo scientists and reducing typically weeks-long workflows to hours.
Phylo launched Biomni Lab, an integrated workspace where scientists plan, author, execute and collaborate on complex research tasks with agentic AI. It integrates over 300 databases, software systems and analytical tools and is available in research preview.
Phylo states on its website that it is ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant.
The founders began Biomni at Stanford in June 2024 as an open-source, general-purpose AI agent for day-to-day biomedical research tasks; other coverage dates the open-source project's public introduction to June 2025.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
In the news
▸Research sources · 8
primary sources listed
- Phylophylo.bio · web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Phylo do?
- Phylo is an applied AI research lab building Biomni Lab, an agentic "Integrated Biology Environment" for biomedical scientists.
- Who founded Phylo?
- Phylo was founded by Kexin Huang.
- Who are Phylo's investors?
- Phylo's investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Fifty Years, HAWKTAIL, Silicon Gardens, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel.
- Where is Phylo headquartered?
- Phylo is headquartered in Stanford, US.