Insider Brief
- PhnyX Lab has raised $4 million in seed funding led by SK Networks, with participation from prominent AI pioneers Aidan Gomez and Illia Polosukhin, to transform life science operations through generative AI.
- Its flagship platform, Cheiron, launched in December 2024, is already used by over 60 companies — including Korea’s top 10 pharmaceutical firms — to streamline research and clinical trial searches.
- The company is expanding into Cheiron Write, aimed at automating medical writing and cutting documentation timelines from months to weeks or hours, advancing its vision of fully integrated, AI-driven pharmaceutical workflows.
PRESS RELEASE — PhnyX Lab, a pioneering GenAI startup transforming how life science companies operate, announced the successful close of a $4 million seed round through a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE). The round was led by SK Networks, with participation from several prominent angel investors — including Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, and Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol — both of whom are original co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need,” the paradigm-shifting work that ushered in the transformer era and laid the foundation for today’s generative AI models, including ChatGPT. Their involvement follows extensive discussions with both Sung-hwan Choi, Executive Advisor to PhnyX Lab and COO of SK Networks, and Min-seok Bae, CEO of PhnyX Lab — reflecting a shared conviction in the transformative role of AI.
“This funding marks an important milestone that reflects PhnyX Lab’s potential to fundamentally transform how life science companies work,” said Min-seok Bae, CEO of PhnyX Lab. “Our mission goes beyond improving efficiency — we’re reimagining the way critical work gets done, helping organizations accelerate not only drug discovery but also approval and delivery. The early success of our Cheiron platform and its rapid adoption by leading pharmaceutical companies has proven the real-world impact of our technology. With this funding, we’re positioned to scale our team, deepen our product capabilities, and forge global partnerships that push the boundaries of what’s possible in life sciences.”
PhnyX Lab’s flagship platform, Cheiron, launched in December 2024, is already gaining strong traction across industry with over 60 companies, including all of Korea’s top 10 pharmaceutical companies by revenue, using Cheiron to streamline complex workflows such as research paper and clinical trial searches.
Building on this momentum, PhnyX Lab is now expanding Cheiron into a broader product suite. In June, the company entered strategic partnerships with SK Biopharmaceuticals and Samil Pharmaceutical to support the development of Cheiron Write — a new offering under the Cheiron brand designed to automate medical writing. Cheiron Write aims to compress documentation workflows that traditionally take months into just weeks or even hours. This expansion marks a pivotal step toward transforming manual, fragmented pharmaceutical processes into intelligent, integrated workflows — bringing the company closer to its vision of fundamentally reengineering how life sciences work.
Featured image: Credit: PhnyX Lab
