Phylo, an Agentic AI Lab, Launches with $13.5M Seed Round, Introduces Biomni Lab
Phylo, a Stanford spin-out, has just launched as an applied lab focused on agentic AI for biomedical research. Alongside the launch, the team announced Biomni Lab, reportedly the first “Integrated Biology Environment” (IBE), and disclosed a $13.5M seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund with Anthropic. Scientific advisors include Carolyn Bertozzi, Feng Zhang, and Fabian Theis.
Phylo’s work builds on Biomni, an open-source AI agent project started at Stanford in 2024. Biomni was developed as a general-purpose agent for routine biomedical research tasks and, according to the company, has seen broad adoption across research and industry settings.
In September, Biomni partnered with Sage Bionetworks to integrate the Synapse platform, providing access to roughly 3 petabytes of curated biomedical data. Currently, the team is reporting extending Biomni with reinforcement-learning–based agents applied to tasks including experiment design, lab automation, and drug discovery workflows.
Biomni Lab Inteface
The lab describes three focus areas:
- ongoing open and academic research on agentic systems for biomedicine;
- product development centered on their IBE concept;
- deployment across academic, biotech, pharma, and healthcare settings. The Biomni open-source project will continue to be maintained.
According to Phylo, IBE is a shared workspace that combines a user interface, an AI agent, and integrations with common biological tools and databases. In this setup, scientists define questions and review results, while agents execute searches, analyses, and workflows across connected systems.
Biomni Lab is positioned as a unified workspace that integrates hundreds of biological databases, software tools, and analytical systems, with connections to resources such as Consensus, COSMIC, and Addgene. Phylo reports active use by alpha users and highlighted a case study with Ginkgo Bioworks involving accelerated cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses.
Cover photo: Menlo Ventures
Topic: Biotech Ventures
