Flagship Pioneering Launches iris labs to Transform Human Wellbeing Through AI

First product, iris chat™, is an AI thought partner designed to help people build meaningful relationships, develop a stronger sense of self, and live with greater purpose and fulfillment

Company launches with an initial commitment of $20 million in funding from Flagship

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Flagship Pioneering, a scientific innovation engine for transformative platforms and products, today announced the launch of iris labs, a company building personal AI products designed to advance human wellbeing.

iris labs was conceived more than two years ago on the belief that helping people lead more fulfilling lives is a defining opportunity for AI. The company's work is grounded in psychological fitness: building the capacities to navigate life's challenges and create more of what is meaningful. This framework informs how iris labs designs and evaluates its novel products, drawing on key dimensions of wellbeing to connect personalized support with its broader ambition for human flourishing.

iris chat™, the company's first product, is an AI thought partner designed to help you lead a more fulfilling life by deepening relationships, strengthening sense of self, and cultivating resilience, purpose, and hope. Through ongoing conversation on iMessage and RCS, it learns about your experiences, priorities, and aspirations, grounding the experience in who you are and the life you want to build.

"People build resilience, purpose, and confidence through the countless small moments that shape everyday life," said Armen Mkrtchyan, Ph.D., CEO, Board Member, and Co-founder of iris labs and Origination Partner at Flagship Pioneering. "We created iris labs around the belief that AI can uniquely support those moments by helping people better understand what they're experiencing, find perspective and take the next step, while keeping them firmly in charge of their own lives."

Designed to feel as natural as texting someone who knows you well, iris chat learns as you engage with it. It can help you recognize meaningful patterns in your life, prepare for important conversations, clarify goals and priorities, and take concrete steps toward what matters to you. The experience adapts as your relationships, circumstances, and aspirations evolve.

"We've seen incredible early traction with iris chat, validating both the product and the broader platform," said Rockwell Shah, Co-founder and President of iris labs and Partner at Flagship Pioneering. "People aren't just trying iris chat; they're coming back to it time and again. That engagement reinforces something we've believed from the start: people want AI for more than productivity. They want technology that can help them better understand themselves, navigate their relationships, and make meaningful changes in their lives."

iris labs has developed a novel approach to helping AI engage more thoughtfully in subjective, emotionally complex conversations. While self-learning systems can readily improve in objective domains with clear measures of success, such as games or coding, meaningful conversations require an AI to recognize nuance without reinforcing unproductive patterns. iris chat combines expert-informed guidance with AI judges, agents that evaluate and refine the outputs of other agents, to create consistent quality loops for these interactions.

Safety is foundational to how iris chat was designed. The product includes a safety scaffold that pairs each conversation with a parallel AI safety agent designed to assess interactions in real time and guide responses when a conversation warrants additional safeguards. Rather than relying on one-size-fits-all safeguards, the system draws on conversational context to distinguish genuine concern from ambiguity and support more appropriate, measured responses. This approach reflects the belief that safety and progress can reinforce one another: early evidence suggests that users who interact with iris chat's safety systems are much more likely to continue using the product.

"Artificial intelligence represents one of the most profound technology platforms of our time, with the potential to redefine how we understand and improve the human experience," said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-founder of iris labs. "At Flagship, we seek opportunities where breakthrough technologies can open entirely new frontiers rather than simply improve existing approaches. iris labs reflects that philosophy, exploring how AI can deepen our understanding of human wellbeing while creating a new platform at the intersection of psychology and intelligent systems."

In addition to Afeyan, Mkrtchyan and Shah, the founding team includes Ayşe Muñiz, Ph.D., Principal, Flagship Pioneering.

iris chat is available through iMessage and RCS, bringing personal AI into a familiar part of everyday life. It can be accessed at www.chatwithiris.com.

About iris labs

iris labs™ is building personal AI products designed to help people lead more fulfilling lives. Founded within Flagship Labs, the company brings together psychology, behavioral science, artificial intelligence, and product design, with psychological fitness guiding how it develops and evaluates its products. Its first product, iris chat™, is an AI thought partner delivered through iMessage and RCS, designed to help people deepen their relationships, strengthen their sense of self, and cultivate resilience, purpose, and hope. Through ongoing conversation, iris chat learns about each person's experiences, priorities, and aspirations, adapting as their lives evolve. Learn more at www.irislabs.com.

About Flagship Pioneering

Flagship Pioneering invents and builds platform companies, each with the potential for multiple products that transform human health, sustainability and beyond. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has originated and fostered more than 100 scientific ventures, operating with $14 billion of assets under its direction as of its latest capital raise, announced in July 2024. The current Flagship ecosystem comprises more than 40 companies, including Generate Biomedicines, Inari, Lila Sciences, Moderna, Sana Biotechnology, Tessera Therapeutics and Valo Health.

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SOURCE Flagship Pioneering