Phylo Introduces Biomni Lab, an Integrated Environment for AI-Native Biology

Backed by a $13.5M seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund with Anthropic, Phylo is led by Stanford AI and biology researchers Kexin Huang, Ph.D. and Yuanhao Qu, Ph.D.

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., Feb. 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Phylo, an applied AI research lab building technology to help biologists get more done, faster, today announced the launch of Biomni Lab. Biomni Lab accelerates AI-native biology, allowing scientists — working across physical and computational fields — to plan, author, execute, and collaborate on complex research tasks with state-of-the-art agentic AI in a fully integrated workspace.

Phylo also announced a $13.5 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund, an AI innovation fund created in partnership with Anthropic, with participation from Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel, and others.

Biomni Lab

Biomni Lab is available today in research preview and represents a substantial advancement of prior work. Initially introduced in June 2025 as the open-source project Biomni, it was the first integrated biology environment (IBE) that brought together agentic AI and hundreds of domain-specific tools to create a generalized biomedical AI agent. Biomni Lab unifies the latest agent with an expanded environment, giving scientists one place to orchestrate agents reliably, reproducibly, and at scale.

"Coming from computer science and AI research, it was clear that AI-native biology was going to require an entirely new approach," said Kexin Huang, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Phylo, and first author of the original Biomni research paper. "We built an integrated environment to unify the best of agent architectures with the tools biologists actually use, delivering extraordinary gains in their productivity, similar to what I've experienced with AI-supported software engineering."

Biomni Lab's new agent architecture delivers state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing agent systems by more than 20% across standard benchmarks and real-world, long-horizon scientific evaluations.

"For the past decade in biomedical research, I've seen how much scientific progress is slowed by fragmented workflows and repetitive work—from recreating experimental setups with every new experiment, to debugging scripts and wrangling dependencies across tools," said Yuanhao (Jerry) Qu, Ph.D., Co-founder and President of Phylo, "Biomni Lab changes that. It introduces a new way of working in biology, where a high performing, expert agent is available 24/7 to assist with these everyday tasks—compressing week-long cycles into minutes while maintaining scientific rigor."

Biomni Lab has already demonstrated real-world value in deployment. In a case study with Ginkgo Bioworks, it accelerated more than 10 complex cell-painting and transcriptomic analyses, validated by Ginkgo scientists with publication-quality results, reducing workflows that typically take weeks to just hours.

"Phylo's Biomni Lab platform is user-friendly for all scientists to automate bioinformatics analyses, generate publication-quality figures, and even compare results with external datasets," said Ayla Ergun, Senior Director of Data Science at Ginkgo Bioworks, "At Ginkgo Datapoints, we hope to incorporate Biomni as an everyday tool in our workflows."

Rooted in Open Science

Phylo spun out of the Biomni open-source research project at Stanford, now used by 7,000+ labs, biopharma and healthcare organizations. The company will continue to maintain the Biomni open-source platform and community, advancing foundational open research in agentic AI for biology while translating those advances into production systems.

Phylo was founded by Kexin Huang, Ph.D., and Yuanhao Qu, Ph.D., with scientific co-founders Jure Leskovec, Ph.D. (Stanford Professor in Computer Science), and Le Cong, Ph.D. (Stanford Professor in Pathology), founding advisor Malay Gandhi (ex-Chief Strategy Officer at Benchling), and scientific advisors Carolyn Bertozzi, Ph.D. (Nobel Laureate), Feng Zhang, Ph.D. (CRISPR pioneer), and Fabian Theis, Ph.D. (pioneer in computational biology).

"User adoption is one of the strongest signals that we look for. It's rare, especially in the life sciences, to see an academic research project reach this level of real-world usage and sustained user love. Biomni Lab builds on that strong foundation as the first incarnation of Kexin and Yuanhao's much more ambitious, commercial-grade product vision." said Jorge Conde, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

"Phylo is fundamentally changing the way biological research happens," said Matt Kraning, Partner at Menlo Ventures. "Kexin and Yuanhao have built breakthrough agentic AI technology and integrated it into a platform that brings AI-native productivity to the lab. We're excited to support the team as they accelerate discovery."

Availability

Biomni Lab is available today at https://phylo.bio. Integration partners and enterprises who share this vision, please reach out to [email protected].

SOURCE Phylo, Inc.