Bio Protocol has announced it has raised $6.9m in a funding round anchored by Maelstrom Fund, with participation from leading biotech and crypto investors.
The financing fuels Bio Protocol's expansion into a full-stack platform for AI-driven decentralised science, scientific funding and drug discovery.
A Platform for AI-Driven Decentralised Science
Bio Protocol enables distributed groups of researchers, patients and crypto users to create and grow AI-driven research networks that automate scientific tasks and monetise biotech discoveries.
It is a decentralised science (DeSci) platform building AI-native infrastructure for biotechnology.
Whilst AI in biology is rapidly advancing through initiatives at Google, OpenAI and Stanford, most scientific AI tools remain siloed in traditional pharma and cut off from global collaboration.
Bio integrates scientific AI with blockchain features for coordination, funding and data integrity, allowing biotech research to move faster from hypothesis to commercial application.
Paul Kohlhaas, founder and CEO of Bio Protocol, said: "Science today is locked in institutional black boxes, cut off from the very researchers who birth it and the communities primed to accelerate it."
"By unifying AI, biotech and crypto in a decentralised 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."
Arthur Hayes, founder and CIO of Maelstrom Fund, said: "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."
BioAgents: Onchain Science Machines
BioAgents are decentralised AI agents designed to accelerate and reduce the cost of scientific development whilst maintaining blockchain-verified knowledge flows.
The first BioAgent, Aubrai, launched in late August 2025 in partnership with VitaDAO and leading longevity researcher Dr Aubrey de Grey.
Trained on Dr. de Grey's lab data and community insights, Aubrai has, in its first weeks, accomplished the following:
- Generated more than $900,000 in research funding
- Minted more than 1000 hypotheses on-chain
- Enabled immediate lab testing with agent-managed wallets and research workflows
- Bio plans to expand the BioAgent framework globally to more researchers, creating networks of agents that surface hidden connections across biology faster than legacy labs.
Key BioAgent features:
Continuous funding: each BioAgent is connected to an on-chain wallet that collects fees, makes payments and redistributes value to fund wet-lab experiments and trials, enabling research to start immediately once vetted, rather than languishing in traditional funding cycles.
Crowdsourced learning: BioAgents learn continuously from encrypted research vaults, as well as social and messaging platforms, while reading and writing to a global knowledge graph integrated across the Bio network.
Blockchain-verified knowledge flow: BioAgents create an immutable trail of blockchain-verified scientific progress, ensuring credit and rewards flow back to contributors whose early insights or negative results paved the way for discoveries.
Knowledge monetisation: BioAgents generate fees by providing insights, compounds and services to pharma companies, consumers and other research organisations, as well as by generating market-making fees in the agent's native token.
Introducing Bio Protocol V2
Bio's funding round coincides with the launch of Bio V2, which introduces advanced on-chain funding, governance and incentive structures to the network.
Key Bio V2 features include the following:
- Ignition sales: a launch model enabling low-cap, high-velocity fundraising for Decentralised Scientific AI Agents (BioAgents) and tokenised intellectual property (IP Tokens), lowering barriers for early supporters
- BioXP: a loyalty and incentive system rewarding positive-sum contributions such as research inputs and marketing support, granting BioXP recipients with access to Ignition Sales
- Staking: BIO and ecosystem tokens can be staked to earn BioXP, aligning long-term support with participatory rights in resulting IP.
Real-World Assets Advancing Rapidly.
Since 2024, Bio Protocol's network has directed over $50m 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 a fraction of traditional biotech costs and timelines, including the following:
- VITA-FAST – longevity program progressing toward Phase 2 clinical trials in the UAE.
- VitaRNA – RNA program dosing first patients in the UAE, with expansion planned in Europe
- Percepta (CLAW) – brain health supplement entering human studies with accelerated regulatory pathways
- Curetopia (CURES) – rare disease program tackling 40 inherited metabolic diseases, advancing pilot studies and IP filings.
These projects demonstrate how decentralised scientific funding and coordination can bring innovations overlooked by pharma from concept to trial in months rather than years.
Strategic Funding Round
Bio's $6.9m round was anchored by Maelstrom Fund, joined by Mechanism Capital, Animoca Brands, Presto Labs and a diverse syndicate of biotech and crypto investors.
Bio will use the funding to scale its launchpad and AI frameworks, while developing key features such as prediction markets, on-chain lending and agent-to-agent communication.
"Just as digital publishing platforms gave creators the ability to build and monetise audiences outside traditional media, Bio Protocol empowers scientists to build and monetise research outside traditional pharma structures," said Kohlhaas.