Biology software developer Phylo Inc. today announced that it has raised $13.5 million in seed funding.

Andreessen Horowitz led the round with Anthology Fund, a $100 million investment vehicle created last in 2024 by Menlo Ventures and Anthropic PBC. Zetta, Conviction, SV Angel and several others chipped in as well.

Biologists use numerous applications to process the scientific data produced by their labs. Those applications often aren’t compatible with one another, which creates technical challenges. Loading experimental results from one program to another often requires scientists to manually reformat the data or loop in a bioinformatics expert.

Phylo promises to ease the workflow. The startup offers an artificial intelligence application called Biomni Lab that can automatically move data between different software tools. Furthermore, it provides a ChatGPT-like interface that enables biologists to centrally access their tools without opening multiple tabs. 

Phylo refers to Biomni Lab as an integrated biology environment. The term is a nod to the integrated development environments, or IDEs, that programmers use to write software. An IDE combines a code editing interface with debugging tools, a compiler that turns code into functioning programs and other features. Biomni Lab’s chatbot interface provides access to 82 biology tools, 68 databases and more than 100 software packages.

Biologists can instruct the tool to perform research tasks by entering natural language commands. For example, a scientist could upload data about the chemical composition of a protein and ask Biomni Lab to simulate the protein’s shape. It’s possible to customize details such as the AI model that the tool should use to generate protein shape predictions.

If the research task specified by the user is particularly complicated, Biomni Lab can distribute it across multiple graphics cards to speed up processing. When necessary, it visualizes the output data to ease analysis. The tool can generate not only charts but also three-dimensional models of objects such as molecules.

After Biomni Lab generates processing results, it automatically reviews the output for hallucinations. If some of the results were obtained by running an AI-written script, the platform displays the script’s code to facilitate manual verification. The interface displays a natural language explanation of each issue that it finds.

Biomni Lab is based on an eponymous open-source project that was released last June. According to Phylo, the project has been adopted by more than 4,300 organizations including 18 of the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical companies. The company says that its software enabled one early adopter, Ginkgo Bioworks Holdings Inc., to complete certain cellular analysis tasks in hours instead of weeks.

Phylo offers Biomni Lab’s core feature set through a free cloud service with daily usage limits. The company generates revenue with a paid edition that includes additional cybersecurity controls, support for custom AI agents and other enhancements. 

“Today, the cognitive overhead of switching tools, reformatting data, and managing handoffs constantly interrupts scientific thinking,” Menlo Venture Partner Matt Kraning wrote in a blog post. “Phylo compresses that loop. A question that would have taken days of setup can be explored in an afternoon.”

Photo: Menlo Ventures