Drylab draws investment to develop autonomous AI research agents
The start-up will use the funding to recruit staff and pursue certifications required by large research organisations.
Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India has led an investment round in Drylab, a start-up developing AI agents for computational scientific research. Fellow investor PatSnap will contribute its life sciences network, data and AI capabilities to support the company’s expansion into pharmaceutical and biotechnology research.
Drylab said the money would fund enterprise sales recruitment, additional engineering and biology staff, and efforts to obtain security and compliance certifications. Following its February 2026 commercial launch, it reported securing paying customers including pharmaceutical businesses, cancer centres, biomedical institutes and universities across Asia, Europe and the US.
The company says its agents are designed to handle research workflows independently, from defining an analytical approach to conducting experiments and assessing results. They can draw on more than 800 integrated databases and scientific tools, allocate computing resources and troubleshoot problems, according to Drylab.
A separate verification model assesses the agents’ analytical choices for methodological mistakes, the company said. It also offers deployment on customers’ private computing infrastructure or local workstations, allowing research organisations to retain their data within their own systems.
CEO John Phan, CTO Huy Phan and CSO Nhi Nguyen established Drylab in 2025. Vertex general partner Genping Liu linked the company’s development to Vietnam’s technology talent. Nguyen, a biomedical science PhD candidate at Nanyang Technological University, helped inspire the venture after teaching herself bioinformatics to analyse laboratory data.
