Briefly Bio, a London-based biotech startup providing a tool to make lab work reproducible, has raised $1.2m (£920,000) in funding.
The startup, which claims that science is in a “reproducibility crisis,” says that lab scientists struggle to reproduce and build on top of each other’s experiments while the data scientists don’t have the necessary context to analyse the data produced in their labs.
In preclinical research over 50% of efforts to reproduce experiments fail, costing the industry over $50bn each year, according to Briefly Bio.
Founded by Dr Katya Putintseva, Harry Rickerby and Staffan Piledahl, Briefly Bio aims to solve this problem through its AI-powered software.
The software uses AI to convert existing experiment descriptions into a consistent format so it’s understandable to any new scientist who may work on the project. It also automatically fills in gaps and spot errors.
This helps capture the value of every experiment that is run and enables scientists to learn from each other’s work.
The startup will use the pre-seed funding to expand its operations and development efforts.
The round was led by Compound VC, with participation from NP Hard, and Tiny VC.
“Scientific methods are a bit like software code; they are a set of instructions that define how an experiment should be run,” said Harry Rickerby, CEO and co-founder at Briefly Bio. “The majority of this ‘code’ is incomplete, since writing up each experiment completely takes a huge amount of effort.
“With LLMs, there’s a way to make these methods consistent without imposing on a scientist’s 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.”