Phylo

Phylo is an applied research lab focused on developing agentic AI systems for biomedical research. The company builds AI agents designed to work alongside biologists, helping them conduct research tasks more efficiently and at greater scale. Phylo was spun out of the Biomni research project at the Stanford AI Lab, and its team includes researchers, engineers, and scientists involved in building early AI agents in biomedicine. The company has raised a seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) and Menlo Ventures.

Phylo's primary product is Biomni Lab, described as an Integrated Biology Environment — a unified workspace where biologists can collaborate with AI agents to plan, execute, and iterate on research tasks. The platform is designed to handle complex biological workflows that would typically take weeks, completing them in minutes, while maintaining scientific rigor and reproducibility.

Core Capabilities of Biomni Lab

• Collaborative agent interaction: Biomni acts as a scientific collaborator, asking clarifying questions, planning alongside the researcher, and iterating on tasks together.
• Complex task execution: supports tasks such as protein design, multi-omics data analysis, and reading and summarizing large numbers of scientific papers.
• Scientific rigor: reviews each step of a task by scanning for hallucinations and factual mistakes, with full code transparency and clear references to support reproducibility.
• Personalization: continuously learns user preferences in the background while giving users full control over their workflows.
• Scalability: handles multiple tasks simultaneously, supports large files and memory, and scales to GPU infrastructure.

Ecosystem Integration

• Biomni Lab integrates natively with the biomedical research ecosystem, connecting to 68 databases, 108 software packages, and 82 tools.
• The platform is purpose-built for biology, with integrations spanning the breadth of biomedical research infrastructure.

Security and Compliance

• Phylo is ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, providing enterprise-grade data protection and privacy for research data.

Customers and Users

• Biomni Lab is used by researchers across academic and industry settings, including neuroscientists, biotech executives, and data science teams.
• Ginkgo Bioworks (via Ginkgo Datapoints) has noted use of Biomni Lab for automating bioinformatics analyses, generating publication-quality figures, and comparing results with external datasets.
• Fabian Theis, Professor at TU Munich, has described Biomni as a general-purpose biomedical AI agent that reduces programming overhead for researchers.

Team and Scientific Advisors

• Co-founders include Kexin Huang (CEO) and Yuanhao Qu (President), alongside scientific co-founders Jure Leskovec and Le Cong.
• Scientific advisors include Feng Zhang, Carolyn Bertozzi, and Fabian Theis.
• Founding advisors include Malay Gandhi and Ben Glicksberg.

Phylo positions Biomni Lab as a tool for biomedical scientists across skill levels, aiming to make advanced research capabilities accessible without requiring extensive programming knowledge.