| Photo: Drylab |
The round is led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, with participation from PatSnap, a global provider of AI-driven solutions for innovation intelligence, whose global life sciences network, data, and AI capabilities will support Drylab’s growth in pharmaceutical and biotech research and development (R&D).
Drylab will use the capital to hire enterprise sales staff, expand its engineering and biology teams, and pursue the security and compliance certifications that large research organisations require. The company launched commercially in February 2026 and has since signed paying customers across leading pharmaceutical companies, cancer centres, biomedical research institutes, and universities in the US, Europe, and Asia.
John Phan, CEO of Drylab, said, “AI is pushing the boundaries of science. Our vision is to bring that capability into the daily work of highly regulated industry like biopharma through a swarm of autonomous AI agents working alongside researchers. Realising this potential requires a framework that makes AI reliable, reproducible, and secure within each organisation’s own environment. 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.”
Genping Liu, general partner of Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, said, “Just as AI transformed software engineering, AI for Science is set to reinvent laboratory research. Drylab AI represents a new standard of global ambition coming out of Vietnam’s world-class tech talent pool: leveraging cutting-edge agentic workflows to empower life scientists and drug discovery teams worldwide.”
Sequencing a human genome cost about $95 million in 2001 and about $500 by 2022, according to the US National Human Genome Research Institute. This revolution has enabled laboratories to generate biological data at an unprecedented scale, yet the ability to analyse and translate that data into scientific discoveries has struggled to keep pace.
Thousands of specialised bioinformatics tools, fragmented computational infrastructure, and a shortage of computational expertise have created a growing bottleneck in biomedical research. Scientists often spend weeks coordinating analyses, troubleshooting pipelines, and waiting for results, slowing the pace of experimentation and discovery.
Drylab is building a new generation of autonomous AI scientists capable of independently carrying out computational research from start to finish. Rather than requiring researchers to continuously prompt, instruct, or supervise individual tasks, Drylab’s agents can take ownership of entire research workflows: understanding scientific objectives, formulating analytical strategies, selecting from more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases, provisioning computational resources, executing experiments, interpreting results, and autonomously troubleshooting failures.
Its proprietary verification model, trained on real scientific analysis runs, evaluates analytical decisions and identifies methodological errors, enabling agents to independently correct and refine their work.
For pharmaceutical companies and research institutions handling sensitive data and valuable intellectual property, Drylab offers secure deployment on private infrastructure or local workstations, enabling organisations to develop autonomous scientific capabilities within their own environments without compromising ownership of their data or discoveries.
The company was founded in 2025 by CEO John Phan, CTO Huy Phan, and CSO Nhi Nguyen. Phan carried out AI research with ByteDance’s seed team, and Huy was a visiting research engineer at Andrew Ng’s Landing AI.
Nhi, a PhD candidate in biomedical science at Nanyang Technological University, taught herself bioinformatics to analyse her lab’s data, an experience that led to Drylab.
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