Briefly Bio recently secured $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, led by Compound VC, with contributions from NP Hard, Tiny VC, and angel investors from the tech and biotech sectors.

The complexity of biological experiments has increased, often leading to undocumented details that hinder scientific collaboration. Lab scientists struggle to reproduce each other's work, data scientists lack context for analysis, and automation teams miss critical information for building robotic labs.

Briefly Bio tackles these issues by creating a shared language for experiments, ensuring consistency and clarity for all collaborators. Their AI-powered software converts existing experiment descriptions into a standard format, fills in gaps, and identifies errors, capturing the value of each experiment and fostering collaborative learning.

Founded by Dr Katya Putintseva, Harry Rickerby, and Staffan Piledahl, Briefly Bio's team brings diverse expertise from academia, tech, biotech, and robotics. Before founding Briefly Bio, the trio worked at drug discovery startup LabGenius, where they contributed to developing an ML-driven antibody discovery platform.

Harry Rickerby, CEO and co-founder at Briefly Bio, commented: “Scientific methods are a bit like software code, they are a set of instructions that define how an experiment should be run. The majority of this ‘code’ is incomplete, since writing up each experiment completely takes a huge amount of effort. Now, with LLMs, there’s a way to make these methods consistent without imposing on a scientists’ workflow. As Github helped software engineers collaborate and build on each other’s code, we think Briefly can help scientists and engineers do the same with their experiments.”

With AI and high throughput experimentation, there is an opportunity for huge improvements in the efficiency of scientific discovery. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested through startups and big pharma to take advantage. To realise this potential, science needs more consistency and transparency in how these datasets are generated, since the value of any model is a product of the data it has been trained on. Briefly Bio is building this necessary layer of infrastructure to accelerate scientific discovery in biology.

“This is a revolution in documenting lab experiments. It is the future of foolproof knowledge-sharing between scientists” said Dr Gena Nikitin, Founder of Miphic. While Dr Maria Anastasina, Wet Lab Head at the Evolutionary and Synthetic Biology Unit, OIST, added: “Briefly has become a core part of our lab's knowledge base and a great help to me in training researchers and lab management”. And Suparna Kumar, PhD student at Weill Cornell commented: “Briefly Bio has become an indispensable part of my lab routine because it helps me save so much time”.

Rob Harkness, CTO of Biosero, added: “We're very excited by what Breifly.Bio can offer with their software tools. Inconsistent and incomplete data can compromise research, making it difficult to reproduce experiments and undermining trust in scientific results. Digitalising and automating laboratory operations can address this, but this effort faces challenges of inefficiency and high error rates, primarily due to the diverse formats in which workflows are presented. Briefly.bio addresses this by converting scientific protocols written in natural language into a common and consistent structured format. This facilitates much faster design and implementation of automated systems, ensuring all critical information is captured and utilized effectively. The result is a significant boost in workflow integration, efficiency, and data quality, all of which are crucial for generating reliable experimental results. This leads to more comprehensive and innovative solutions in lab automation that can only help accelerate scientific research.”

Shelby Newsad, Investor at Compound, commented: “The crux of successful science lies in consistent and executable methods. Whereas most bio software companies focus on data and its analysis, Briefly goes upstream to the core problem space of reproducibility via protocols. For the first time in science history, this incentivises scientists to share more of their previously tacit knowledge. The fact that Briefly-made methods can be built and collaborated upon creates unique potential for network effects from their software.”

Briefly Bio is creating a future where scientists can stop reinventing the wheel – spending time and resources on experiments that they can’t reproduce. This will enable scientists to produce datasets that will quickly expand our understanding of biology.