Drylab AI, an autonomous agent platform for life sciences research, has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, with participation from PatSnap.

In a statement on Wednesday, Vertex Ventures said PatSnap’s global life sciences network would support its growth in pharmaceutical and biotechnology research.

Drylab, based in Singapore and founded by a team of Vietnamese  people, will utilize the money to hire enterprise sales staff, expand its engineering and biology teams, and pursue the security and compliance certifications. It launched commercially in February 2026 and has signed paying customers among leading pharmaceutical companies, cancer centers, biomedical research institutes, and universities in the United States, Europe, and Asia.

John Phan, co-founder and CEO, said AI is advancing science and that the company aims to bring that capability into highly regulated industries such as biopharma. A system of autonomous AI agents working alongside researchers can keep analyses reliable, reproducible, and secure within each organization’s own environment.

Genping Liu, general partner at Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, said AI for science is set to reinvent laboratory research. Drylab is an example of global ambition from Vietnam’s technology talent pool, Liu added.

Drylab describes its agents as capable of carrying out computational research from start to finish. The AI agent can understand a scientific objective, plan an analytical approach, select from more than 800 integrated scientific tools and databases, provision computing resources, run experiments, interpret results, and recover from failures.

The company says its verification model, trained on real analysis runs, evaluates analytical decisions and identifies methodological errors so that agents can correct their own work. For pharmaceutical companies and research institutions handling sensitive data.

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