Bio Protocol Raises $6.9M to Launch AI-Native Decentralized Science Platform for Drug Discovery
核心洞察
Bio Protocol (搜索) secured $6.9 million in funding led by Maelstrom Fund (搜索) to develop an AI-native decentralized science platform that enables researchers to create autonomous AI agents for biotech research and drug discovery.
The platform's first BioAgent, Aubrai, generated over $900,000 in research funding and minted more than 1,000 hypotheses in its initial weeks of operation.
Bio Protocol (搜索)'s network has already directed over $50 million in research funding globally, with several projects advancing toward clinical trials including longevity (搜索) and rare disease (搜索) programs.
Bio Protocol (搜索), a decentralized science platform building AI-native infrastructure for biotechnology, announced it has raised $6.9 million in a funding round anchored by Maelstrom Fund (搜索), with participation from leading biotech and crypto investors including Mechanism Capital (搜索), Animoca Brands (搜索), and Presto Labs (搜索). The financing will fuel Bio Protocol's expansion into a full-stack platform for AI-driven decentralized science, scientific funding and drug discovery.
The Switzerland-based company enables distributed groups of researchers, patients and crypto users to create and grow AI-driven research networks that automate scientific tasks and monetize biotech discoveries. According to founder and CEO Paul Kohlhaas, the platform addresses a critical gap in current scientific infrastructure.
"Science today is locked in institutional black boxes, cut off from the very researchers who birth it and the communities primed to accelerate it," Kohlhaas said. "By unifying AI, biotech, and crypto in a decentralized platform, researchers and citizen scientists everywhere can collaborate more efficiently and back promising biotech from its earliest stages, compressing drug development from decades to months."
BioAgents Drive Autonomous Research
Central to Bio Protocol (搜索)'s approach are BioAgents - decentralized AI agents designed to accelerate and reduce the cost of scientific development while maintaining blockchain-verified knowledge flows. The first BioAgent, Aubrai, launched in late August 2025 in partnership with VitaDAO (搜索) and longevity (搜索) researcher Dr. Aubrey de Grey.
In its initial weeks of operation, Aubrai demonstrated significant traction by generating over $900,000 in research funding, minting more than 1,000 hypotheses onchain, and enabling immediate lab testing with agent-managed wallets and research workflows. The AI agent was trained on Dr. de Grey's lab data and community insights.
Each BioAgent operates with several key capabilities including continuous funding through onchain wallets that collect fees and redistribute value to fund wet-lab experiments, crowdsourced learning from encrypted research vaults and global knowledge graphs, and blockchain-verified knowledge flows that create immutable trails of scientific progress.
Platform Evolution and Real-World Impact
The funding round coincides with the launch of Bio Protocol (搜索) V2, which introduces advanced onchain funding, governance and incentive structures. Key features include Ignition Sales for low-cap, high-velocity fundraising, BioXP loyalty systems rewarding research contributions, and staking mechanisms that align long-term support with intellectual property rights.
Since 2024, Bio Protocol (搜索)'s network has directed over $50 million in research funding to scientists globally, offering an alternative path amid cuts to legacy scientific funding models worldwide. Several ecosystem projects are rapidly advancing toward clinical trials at reduced costs and timelines compared to traditional biotech development.
Notable projects include VITA-FAST, a longevity (搜索) program progressing toward Phase 2 clinical trials in the UAE; VitaRNA, an RNA program dosing first patients in the UAE with European expansion planned; Percepta (CLAW), a brain health (搜索) supplement entering human studies; and Curetopia (CURES), a rare disease (搜索) program tackling 40 inherited metabolic diseases (搜索) while advancing pilot studies and IP filings.
Market Transformation Vision
Arthur Hayes, founder and CIO of Maelstrom Fund (搜索), emphasized the platform's potential market impact: "Bio is about to be the category-defining launchpad which will fund scientific research the community finds appealing, not just academics. If it works, it's not just a launchpad - it's the birth of an AI-native research market."
Bio Protocol (搜索) will use the funding to scale its launchpad and AI frameworks while developing features like prediction markets, onchain lending and agent-to-agent communication. The company positions itself as addressing the siloed nature of current scientific AI tools, which remain cut off from global collaboration despite rapid advances at major institutions like Google (搜索), OpenAI (搜索), and Stanford (搜索).
The platform integrates scientific AI with blockchain features for coordination, funding and data integrity, allowing biotech research to move faster from hypothesis to commercial application while making biotech innovation more accessible to researchers and patients worldwide.