Led by Draper Associates, funds will accelerate Potato's effort to develop autonomous AI scientists for biotech research.
— Potato, a technology company focused on building autonomous science agents, today announced $4.5 million in new funding, led by Draper Associates.
The funds will accelerate Potato's mission to automate scientific research. Potato's AI agents orchestrate scientific workflows and use tools to execute computational and wet lab experiments. The goal is to dramatically expedite the pace of discovery at a fraction of the cost, leading to life-saving medical breakthroughs. The company is also expanding from biotech to other areas of scientific research, including materials science and chemistry.
In addition to Draper Associates, other funds participating in the round include Dolby Family Ventures, Boost VC, Ensemble VC, Silicon Badia, Alumni Ventures, Defined, and The FounderVC, as well as strategic angels Michael Liou and Geoff Entress.
Potato addresses critical challenges faced by the scientific community, including an overwhelming accumulation of published research, persistently high research costs, and the inability to reproduce scientific results. Potato's capabilities include tools to:
“AGI is getting closer every day. We're equipping the next generation of agents with tools for orchestrating scientific workflows and running experiments, with a long-term vision of fully autonomous research collaborators,” said Nick Edwards, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Potato.
“With support from Draper Associates and our other investors, we're excited to expand our capabilities and support more researchers across biotech, pharma, and academic institutions.”
“It is becoming clear that AI agents will create new productivity by wielding the same tools currently used by humans,” said Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director at Draper Associates. “The opportunity to accelerate science and enable runaway knowledge production is bigger than the Internet.”
Potato was founded in 2023 by Nick Edwards, a neuroscientist with research experience at Brown University and the NIH and a business background from BCG and Illumina, and Ryan Kosai, former CTO of Pioneer Square Labs and principal engineer at ExtraHop Networks, with twenty years in engineering and data science leadership.
The company has already established a strategic partnership with global scientific publisher Wiley and is part of this year's Merck Digital Sciences Studio cohort.
Potato is developing autonomous AI scientists and was founded in 2023. The company's tools are used by major academic institutions and labs including Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of California Berkeley, The Scripps Research Institute, and Harvard University, as well as leading biotech and non-profit labs.