Singapore-based Drylab AI has raised a US$3 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures, with participation from unicorn patent intelligence platform PatSnap. The company builds an AI agent platform designed to execute scientific research with reduced need for constant prompts, instruction or supervision from scientists.
Drylab AI’s technology and capabilities
Drylab’s agents are designed to understand research objectives, formulate strategies and select from “more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases” to carry out experiments. The agents can interpret results and autonomously troubleshoot failures. Drylab says it trained its AI model on real scientific analysis runs, learning from decisions and methodological errors to correct and refine work.
The platform can be deployed within the infrastructure of a pharmaceutical company or a research institution so organisations can develop autonomous AI agents while keeping their data and discoveries on premises. John Phan, co-founder and CEO of Drylab, said: “Our vision is to bring that capability into the daily work of a highly regulated industry like biopharma, through a swarm of autonomous AI agents working alongside researchers.”
Launched in February, the platform has signed paying customers from pharmaceutical companies, cancer centres, biomedical research institutes and universities across the US, Europe and Asia. Drylab will use the funding to expand its workforce—growing engineering and biology teams and hiring sales staff—and to qualify for the security and compliance certifications needed by large research organisations. Phan added: “This funding will help us accelerate adoption and build powerful, locally deployed intelligence that enables scientists to move from biological questions to validated discoveries faster.”
