Drylab AI raises US$3 million to turn biological data into validated discoveries faster

Led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, the Seed round will help Drylab bring autonomous agents that own entire research workflows to more pharmaceutical companies and research institutions.

Sequencing a human genome cost about US$95 million in 2001 and about US$500 by 2022, according to the US National Human Genome Research Institute. Laboratories can now generate biological data at a scale that was once unthinkable.

The bottleneck has moved

The ability to analyse that data and turn it into discoveries has struggled to keep pace. Thousands of specialised bioinformatics tools, fragmented computational infrastructure and a shortage of computational expertise have created a growing constraint in biomedical research. Scientists often spend weeks coordinating analyses, troubleshooting pipelines and waiting for results, which slows the pace of experimentation.

Agents that own the whole workflow

Drylab AI is building a new generation of autonomous AI scientists to address this. Rather than requiring researchers to prompt, instruct or supervise individual tasks, Drylab’s agents can take ownership of entire 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 on their own.

A proprietary verification model, trained on real scientific analysis runs, evaluates the agents’ analytical decisions and identifies methodological errors. This allows the agents to correct and refine their own work.

John Phan, Co-Founder and 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.”

Built for sensitive data

For pharmaceutical companies and research institutions handling sensitive data and valuable intellectual property, Drylab offers secure deployment on private infrastructure or local workstations. Organisations can 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 Chief Science Officer Nhi Nguyen. It launched commercially in February 2026 and has signed paying customers across leading pharmaceutical companies, cancer centres, biomedical research institutes and universities in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Vertex’s perspective

Genping Liu, General Partner, 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.”

Looking ahead

Drylab will use the new capital to hire enterprise sales staff, expand its engineering and biology teams, and pursue the security and compliance certifications that large research organisations require. As adoption grows, the company aims to give every laboratory its own secure, self-improving AI scientist, with sensitive data and intellectual property remaining under the institution’s control.