Raising our pre-seed to give biotech its week back

A biotech is one of the few companies where you can name the work that matters. It is the science. Everything else exists to keep the science moving, and almost none of it does.

Spend a week inside a twenty-person clinical-stage company and you find something closer to a coordination layer than a lab. Most of the money leaves the building, through CROs, CDMOs, sites and specialist vendors, and most of the week goes to checking work that happened somewhere else. Accruals are rebuilt from a vendor’s estimate rather than from evidence of delivery. A change order arrives, and whether anyone reads it line by line against the signed scope depends on how busy the person who opens it happens to be. Filings, quality agreements, invoices and vendor mail queue up behind that.

None of this is anybody’s fault. It is what happens when a company that was funded to run experiments has to become a finance department, a procurement department, a compliance department and a business development department at the same time, using the same dozen people. The result is a scientist reconciling a purchase order.

What makes this urgent now is that there are about to be far more of these companies. AI-accelerated discovery is lowering the cost of getting to a credible asset, which is exactly the outcome the field wanted. But every one of those companies inherits the same overhead, and the overhead has not moved in twenty years. If it does not, the gains from faster discovery get spent on administration.

What we are building

ribo.bio is an agent-first operating system for everything a biotech does other than the science. It reads the whole company first: contracts, invoices, protocols, filings, mail, and the systems you already pay for, held as one record instead of six. Nothing useful happens until the agents can see the same picture the company does.

From there it works in the open. Every call the agents make arrives with the document it came from, so a challenged invoice or a rebuilt accrual is something you can check in a few seconds rather than a black box you are asked to trust. That constraint is the product. Finance and quality work is not the place for an assistant that cannot show you why.

And then it acts. It files, reconciles, challenges and follows up on its own, and escalates only what genuinely needs a person. The end state is a company that is only a lab: everything around the science runs itself, and the people you hired to do research spend the week doing research.

Who is building it

This is not a problem you can solve from one discipline. Pricing a change order is a finance problem, holding a supplier to a signed scope is a commercial one, and getting an agent to read a protocol correctly is a research one. Our team has worked across all three, at Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, PAI Partners, Averin, American Express, Palantir, the NHS and the Alan Turing Institute, and we have spent the last months with the finance and operations people who actually carry this work inside biotechs.

The start of it

The pre-seed is backed by Entrepreneurs First and Transpose Platform. It goes into two things: the knowledge layer that lets the agents read a company properly, and the first departments running end to end with design partners rather than in a demo.

If you are running finance or operations at a clinical-stage biotech, we would like to map what your week actually goes on, and show you what the agents can take over. That conversation is useful to us whether or not you become a customer. You can book thirty minutes or write to hugo@first-ocean.com.

— Zenyi