Stacks Raises $23M Series A for Life Sciences AI Platform
Stacks, a San Francisco-based AI-native platform for life sciences R&D, has raised $23 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark. The company unifies disparate biological data sources into knowledge graphs optimized for AI model training. The new capital will accelerate platform development, expand the engineering team, and support customer growth among pharma and biotech firms.
Bio-AI Data Platforms Attract Capital
The round arrives amid surging investments in AI infrastructure for biotech. Recursion Pharmaceuticals raised $250 million in convertible notes in July 2024, while Evozyne secured $91 million in September for its protein engineering AI. Stacks stands out by prioritizing data unification over algorithmic innovation, tackling the root cause of AI bottlenecks in drug discovery.
Life sciences R&D teams lose up to 80% of their time wrangling fragmented data from instruments, public databases, and internal silos. The global pharmaceutical R&D market exceeds $250 billion annually, yet AI adoption remains below 20% due to poor data interoperability. Traditional tools like ELNs and LIMS fail to create AI-ready formats, forcing manual ETL processes that delay insights.
Knowledge Graphs Fuel AI Workflows
Stacks builds a 'data operating system' for biology, ingesting multimodal data—genomics, imaging, assays—into dynamic knowledge graphs. This enables foundation models to train on structured, contextual data without custom preprocessing. Compared to Benchling's lab workflow focus ($100M+ raised), Stacks emphasizes backend data harmonization for enterprise-scale AI.
As Stacks co-founder Neel Rajan explained:
"Biology data is trapped in silos across spreadsheets, instruments, and databases. Our graph-native approach makes it instantly queryable by LLMs, cutting data prep from weeks to minutes."
Benchmark partner Victor Lazarte added strategic depth:
"Stacks solves the data problem that plagues every bio-AI company we've seen. This is the pickaxe in the AI gold rush for therapeutics."
Benchmark's participation—known for early bets on Uber and Snapchat—validates Stacks' traction with early customers like Tempus and Recursion. The funding mixes growth capital with strategic signals, enabling Stacks to scale its API amid rising demand for plug-and-play bio data layers.
Bioinformatics Market Scales Rapidly
The bioinformatics market will grow from $18.7 billion in 2024 to $49.1 billion by 2030, at 20.9% CAGR. AI subsets like generative models for proteins see even faster expansion. Recent rounds underscore momentum: Isomorphic Labs ($600M from Alphabet), Generate:Biomedicines ($700M total). Stacks enters as consolidation favors data platforms over siloed apps.
Founders Neel Rajan and Albert Hu bring elite credentials: Rajan is ex-Stanford PhD in computational bio, previously at Google DeepMind; Hu led AI infra at a unicorn biotech. Their track record includes scaling ML pipelines that processed 1PB+ datasets.
Enterprise Bio-AI Expansion Ahead
Stacks plans to double its team from 20 to 40, launch graph APIs for third-party LLMs, and ink partnerships with top-10 pharmas. With $36M total funding, the company targets 10x customer growth in 2025.