AI agent platform Drylab AI raises US$3 million seed round from Vertex Ventures and PatSnap

[SINGAPORE] Drylab AI, an artificial intelligence agent platform, has raised a US$3 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures.

The round also drew participation from unicorn patent intelligence platform PatSnap.

Drylab builds agents that can independently carry out research without scientists having to constantly prompt, instruct or supervise tasks. These agents can understand objectives, formulate strategies and select from “more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases” to carry out experiments.

They can also interpret results and troubleshoot failures autonomously. Drylab has trained its AI model on real scientific analysis runs, learning from decisions and methodological errors made to correct and refine the work.

Drylab can be deployed in the infrastructure of a pharmaceutical company or research institution for the organisation to develop autonomous AI agents for scientific research to protect their data and discoveries.

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.”

The platform, launched in February, has signed up paying customers from pharmaceutical companies, cancer centres, biomedical research institutes and universities in the US, Europe and Asia.

The funding will be used to expand its workforce, expand its engineering and biology teams and hire sales staff. Drylab will also use the capital to qualify for the security and compliance certifications needed for large research organisations.

“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,” said Phan.