ScienceMachine lands early stage funding for bioinformatician agent that can turn ‘raw data into breakthroughs in hours, instead of months.’
London-based AI startup ScienceMachine has secured $3.5 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed funding round to accelerate its mission to transform biomedical research through autonomous AI. The company has developed an autonomous AI agent named Sam, designed to automate the entire data analysis process for biotech and pharma companies, and has the potential to accelerate research into therapies targeting aging and age-related diseases.
Sam is described by the ScienceMachine as as a “24/7 AI bioinformatician” that processes experimental data without human intervention – handling everything from data cleaning and structuring to analysis and visualization. The company claims the AI agent delivers an output typically requiring a full team of data scientists, enabling researchers to discover patterns, insights, and potential breakthroughs more quickly and at significantly lower cost.
“Our AI agent works around the clock, analysing research data from lab to clinic, turning raw data into breakthroughs in hours, instead of months,” said ScienceMachine CEO Lorenzo Sani, CEO. “And we are only at the beginning. We feel like AI will truly transform research and discovery in the coming years.”
ScienceMachine addresses a bottleneck in the longevity and aging research fields, where laboratories face a mountain of complex biological data but often lack the data science resources to analyze it efficiently. The company claims this gap leads to delayed or even missed scientific discoveries. By fully automating bioinformatics workflows, Sam is designed to allow researchers to generate actionable insights more efficiently, regardless of their technical training in data science.
“Our goal is to accelerate the pace of biomedical research as a whole, including for age-related diseases – we believe AI will be the key in unlocking new discoveries in that space,” Sani told us.
Founded this year by Sani and Benjamin Tenmann, the two-person company built and launched a production-ready AI platform already being used by customers. According to ScienceMachine, early users of its platform have reported completing projects in a third of the time and at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional approaches, with some also identifying key errors in previous analyses.
The funding round was led by Revent and Nucleus Capital, with participation from Juniper and several strategic angel investors. The funding is earmarked fuel ScienceMachine’s expansion in the biotech and pharma sectors. The company aims to expand from its initial focus on startups into larger biopharma companies, where demand for scalable data automation is higher and contract values are larger.
“ScienceMachine is one of the most impressive examples we’ve seen of pure execution,” said Revent’s Rebecca Brill. “With just two people, they’ve built a product that’s not only best-in-class technically, but already delivering measurable value to customers. They’re perfectly positioned to disrupt one of the largest and most important markets in the world.”
