Pluto Bio, a leading AI-powered platform for computational biology, has secured $3.6 million in new funding to accelerate the adoption of its enterprise-grade platform among global pharmaceutical companies. The funding round was led by new investor Kickstart, with continued support from existing investor Silverton Partners and angel investors.
The Denver-based company has developed what it describes as the industry's most powerful "canvas for computational biology" - a secure, collaborative environment where scientists at therapeutics companies can explore large, high-dimensional datasets, run auto-scaling bioinformatics pipelines, and generate publication-ready visualizations without writing code.
"AI is transforming how we interrogate biology," said Dalton Wright, General Partner at Kickstart. "What impressed us about Pluto is how it puts the power of LLMs into the hands of domain expert scientists – biologists, translational researchers, and discovery teams – by giving them an instantly intuitive interface for expressing scientific questions faster and in a way that increases scientific rigor and reproducibility."
Bridging the Gap Between AI and Biology
As large language models (LLMs) reshape drug discovery and development, Pluto Bio positions itself at the forefront of empowering biology and translational medicine teams to harness AI in ways that complement human scientific expertise. The platform enables scientists to run proprietary analyses on both public datasets – such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia (CCLE), and Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) – and internal raw data.
Scientists use the platform for critical steps in early to mid-stage drug discovery, including target discovery, mechanism of action (MoA) studies, translational medicine, and biomarkers/precision medicine research. The technology supports a wide range of assays for investigating targets and biomarkers, spanning genomics, transcriptomics, epigenetics, and proteomics.
Enterprise Adoption and Integration
The platform has gained traction with mid-market and enterprise clients across North America and Europe, with users spanning discovery biology, translational research, and computational teams. As a collaborative layer over drug discovery data infrastructure, Pluto integrates into existing scientific workflows and supports data governance requirements for regulated environments.
This approach addresses a significant challenge in the pharmaceutical industry: making complex multi-omics data accessible to scientists who understand the underlying biology but may lack specialized computational skills.
Expanding Capabilities and Market Reach
The new funding will support continued development of Pluto's AI agents and copilots, expansion of integrations with other R&D tools, enable build-out of commercial roles, and accelerate deployment across therapeutic areas and modalities.
"With this funding, we're fueling our mission to make high-dimensional biological data accessible to the people who deeply understand the underlying biology and unmet therapeutic needs," said a representative from Pluto Bio. "Teams using Pluto are already demonstrating that innovation in drug discovery accelerates when scientists can directly generate insights from complex data. Our platform was built to make that vision real, whether for a team of ten scientists or an enterprise organization with hundreds."
The investment comes at a time when pharmaceutical companies are increasingly looking to leverage AI and computational approaches to accelerate drug discovery and development timelines while reducing costs. By democratizing access to complex biological data analysis, Pluto Bio aims to remove bottlenecks in the drug discovery process and enable more efficient translation of biological insights into therapeutic candidates.
