PhnyX Lab Secures $4M Seed Funding Led by SK Networks

AI startup PhnyX Lab has successfully closed a $4 million seed funding round, marking a significant step forward in its mission to revolutionize the life sciences sector with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The investment, structured as a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE), was spearheaded by SK Networks, with crucial participation from a roster of highly influential angel investors, including Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere, and Illia Polosukhin, co-founder of NEAR Protocol. Both Gomez and Polosukhin are celebrated as co-authors of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper, a groundbreaking work that laid the architectural foundation for today’s most advanced GenAI models, including ChatGPT. Their involvement underscores a strong belief in PhnyX Lab’s transformative potential, following extensive discussions with PhnyX Lab CEO Min-seok Bae and Sung-hwan Choi, Executive Advisor to PhnyX Lab and COO of SK Networks.

PhnyX Lab, founded in September 2024 in Silicon Valley by Stanford University computer science graduates, aims to fundamentally change how life science companies operate. At the heart of its offerings is Cheiron, the company’s flagship GenAI platform, launched in December 2024. Cheiron is designed to streamline complex workflows within the pharmaceutical industry, from intricate research paper analysis to detailed clinical trial searches. It has quickly gained traction, with over 60 companies, including all of Korea’s top 10 pharmaceutical firms by revenue, already leveraging the platform. PhnyX Lab emphasizes that Cheiron’s mission extends beyond mere efficiency, aiming to “reimagine the way critical work gets done” to accelerate not only drug discovery but also approval and delivery. The platform’s capabilities are enhanced by its use of Modular Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, which ensures accurate, source-verified information retrieval and generation by integrating external databases like PubMed with internal company documents and adhering to medical classification systems like MeSH. This approach helps mitigate the risks of inaccuracies often associated with generic AI models in sensitive fields. Building on this momentum, PhnyX Lab is expanding Cheiron into a broader product suite, including strategic partnerships with SK Biopharmaceuticals and Samil Pharmaceutical to develop “Cheiron Write,” a new tool for automating medical writing.

SK Networks’ leadership in this funding round aligns with its aggressive strategic pivot towards becoming an AI-centric investment firm. The ICT arm of SK Group has publicly stated its ambition to transform its business structure through AI-powered models, targeting a triple increase in operating profit by 2026. This broader strategy involves actively seeking new growth engines by integrating AI across its diverse portfolio, which spans home appliances, data management, hotels, and automotive services. The company is committed to fostering a global AI collaboration ecosystem and has made significant investments in other AI startups and partnerships, including with Qualcomm for high-performance IoT solutions.

The involvement of AI luminaries like Aidan Gomez and Illia Polosukhin lends considerable weight to PhnyX Lab’s potential. Their foundational contributions to the Transformer architecture, which underpins the vast majority of modern GenAI, signal a profound endorsement of PhnyX Lab’s approach and its relevance in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

Generative AI is increasingly recognized as a transformative force across the life sciences, promising to accelerate drug discovery, enable personalized medicine, and optimize clinical trials. By analyzing vast datasets of chemical compounds, biological interactions, and genetic information, GenAI can design novel molecules, predict protein structures, and simulate treatment outcomes, potentially reducing research and development costs by up to 45% and shortening timelines by up to 50%. PhnyX Lab’s focus on verifiable and accurate GenAI solutions, particularly through its Modular RAG framework, positions it to address the industry’s critical need for trustworthy AI in a highly regulated environment. With this new capital, PhnyX Lab plans to scale its team, deepen its product capabilities, and forge global partnerships, aiming to push the boundaries of what’s possible in life sciences.