Drylab AI, an autonomous agent platform for multimodal laboratory data and scientific hypothesis verification, announced on 13 October 2026 that it has closed a US$3 million Seed funding round. The investment was led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, with participation from PatSnap, a global AI-driven innovation intelligence provider. The Singapore-based company, launched commercially in February 2026, plans to use the capital to hire enterprise sales staff, expand its engineering and biology teams, and pursue security and compliance certifications.
Strategic Backing and Commercial Traction
Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India brings experience in backing fast-growing technology startups across the region. PatSnap, known for AI-driven intellectual property and innovation intelligence, will support Drylab's expansion in pharmaceutical and biotech research and development through its life sciences network and data capabilities. The company has already signed paying customers at leading pharmaceutical companies, cancer centers, biomedical research institutes, and universities across the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Addressing a Growing Research Bottleneck
The cost of sequencing a human genome fell from about US$95 million in 2001 to around US$500 by 2022, according to the US National Human Genome Research Institute. This decline has allowed laboratories to produce biological data at unprecedented scale, but analysis and translation into discoveries have not kept pace. Thousands of specialized bioinformatics tools, fragmented computational systems, and a shortage of computational expertise have created a growing bottleneck in biomedical research.
Autonomous Agents for Scientific Workflows
Drylab is building a new generation of autonomous AI scientists capable of carrying out computational research from start to finish. Instead of requiring researchers to continuously prompt, instruct, or supervise individual tasks, its agents can take ownership of complete research workflows. They understand scientific objectives, formulate analytical strategies, select from more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases, provision computational resources, execute experiments, interpret results, and troubleshoot failures independently.
Verification and Secure Deployment
A proprietary verification model, trained on real scientific analysis runs, evaluates analytical decisions and identifies methodological errors, allowing agents to refine their work independently. For pharmaceutical companies and research institutions handling sensitive data and valuable intellectual property, Drylab provides secure deployment on private infrastructure or local workstations. This approach enables organizations to develop autonomous scientific capabilities within their own environments without compromising ownership of their data or discoveries.
CEO Perspective
John Phan, Co-Founder and CEO of Drylab, said AI is pushing the boundaries of science and that the company's vision is to bring that capability into daily biopharma work through autonomous AI agents working alongside researchers. Realizing this potential requires a framework that makes AI reliable, reproducible, and secure within each organization's own environment. The capital will help accelerate adoption and build locally deployed intelligence that moves scientists from biological questions to validated discoveries faster.
Investor Perspective
Genping Liu, General Partner at Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, compared AI's current impact on science to its earlier transformation of software engineering. He said Drylab represents a new standard of global ambition emerging from Vietnam's world-class tech talent pool. Liu added that the company's agentic workflows empower life scientists and drug discovery teams worldwide.
Founding Team and Vision
Drylab was founded in 2025 by CEO John Phan, CTO Huy Phan, and Chief Science Officer Nhi Nguyen. John Phan previously conducted AI research with ByteDance's Seed team, while Huy Phan served as a visiting research engineer at Andrew Ng's Landing AI. Nhi Nguyen, a biomedical science PhD candidate at Nanyang Technological University, taught herself bioinformatics to analyze her own laboratory data, an experience that inspired the company's creation.
Drylab AI's Seed round reflects growing investor confidence in AI for science as life science organizations seek faster and more reliable ways to convert biological data into validated discoveries. With paying customers already across the United States, Europe, and Asia, the company is positioning itself to address a critical bottleneck in pharmaceutical and biomedical research. The new capital will support its next phase of commercial growth, product development, and regulatory readiness.