Realtime AI News
Singapore's Drylab AI Raises US$3M Seed to Build Autonomous Research Agents
Singapore-based AI agent platform Drylab AI has raised a US$3 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures, with participation from the patent-intelligence platform PatSnap. The company builds research agents that can carry out scientific work without constant prompting or supervision, drawing on more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases.
Drylab AI, a Singapore-based AI agent platform, has raised a US$3 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures, with participation from the unicorn patent-intelligence platform PatSnap.
The company builds research agents designed to carry out work without scientists having to constantly prompt, instruct, or supervise them. The agents can understand objectives, formulate strategies, and choose from more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases to run experiments.
They can also interpret results and troubleshoot failures autonomously. Drylab trained its AI model on real scientific analysis runs, learning from decisions and methodological errors so it can correct and refine its work.
The platform can be deployed inside a pharmaceutical company's or research institution's own infrastructure, letting organizations build autonomous research agents while protecting their data and discoveries.
"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," said co-founder and CEO John Phan.
The platform launched in February and has signed paying customers across the United States, Europe, and Asia, including pharmaceutical companies, cancer centers, biomedical research institutes, and universities.
The funding will go toward expanding the workforce, growing its engineering and biology teams, and hiring sales staff. Drylab will also use the capital to qualify for the security and compliance certifications required by large research organizations.
"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," Phan said.
Why it matters
In the fast-moving lab-automation race, Drylab's emphasis on local deployment and autonomous execution speaks directly to biopharma's data-security needs; the modest round matters less than the backing of institutional investors who can help it enter regulated markets.
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