Drylab AI, a Singapore-based startup building autonomous AI agents for scientific research, has raised a $3m seed round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, the company announced on October 13, 2026.
PatSnap, which provides AI-driven innovation intelligence, joined as a strategic investor and will support Drylab's work in pharmaceutical and biotech R&D with its life sciences network, data and AI tools. The company did not disclose a valuation.
“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.”John Phan, CEO, Drylab AI
What Drylab does
The company is aiming at a gap between how much biological data labs can produce and how fast they can analyse it. Sequencing a human genome cost about $95m in 2001 and about $500 by 2022, according to the US National Human Genome Research Institute, as cited by Vietnam Investment Review, but analysis still depends on scarce computational expertise and many specialised tools.
Drylab builds what it calls autonomous AI scientists: agents that carry out computational research from start to finish rather than waiting for a researcher to prompt each step. Given a scientific goal, the agents plan an analysis, choose from more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases, provision computing resources, run the work, interpret results and troubleshoot failed runs.
A verification model trained on real analysis runs checks the agents' decisions and flags methodological errors so they can correct their own work. Scientists can review key choices, such as data thresholds and methods, at set checkpoints, and the platform records each project, including failed experiments, as a reusable knowledge base, VietNamNet reported.
Because pharmaceutical companies handle sensitive data, Drylab can be deployed on a customer's private infrastructure or on local workstations. The company launched commercially in February 2026 and says it has paying customers among pharmaceutical companies, cancer centres, biomedical research institutes and universities in the US, Europe and Asia. It has not named them or disclosed revenue.
VietNamNet reported that Drylab's system ran for seven days without manual intervention in the 2026 OpenADMET PXR Challenge, placing ninth among nearly 400 teams in the first phase.
The founders
Drylab was founded in 2025 by chief executive John Phan, chief technology officer Huy Phan and chief science officer Nhi Nguyen. John Phan previously did AI research with ByteDance's Seed team, and Huy Phan was a visiting research engineer at Andrew Ng's Landing AI.
Nguyen, a PhD candidate in biomedical science at Nanyang Technological University, taught herself bioinformatics to analyse her lab's data, an experience the company says led to Drylab. VietNamNet reported that the company operates in Singapore and San Francisco.
Who invested and what the money is for
Genping Liu, a general partner at Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, said AI for science is set to change laboratory research the way AI changed software engineering, and described Drylab as an example of global ambition from Vietnam's tech talent.
Drylab will use the money to hire enterprise sales staff, grow its engineering and biology teams and obtain the security and compliance certifications that large research organisations require. No earlier funding rounds were reported.
Company website: drylab.ai