Outpost Bio, a deep-tech startup with teams in London and Boston, wants to make human microbiology easier to understand through computation. Their Lab-in-the-Loop platform that fuses machine learning with automated experiments, creating a constant feedback loop between data and discovery.

Today, Outpost Bio just closed a $3.5M pre-seed round, co-led by Merantix Capital and Seedcamp, with backing from OpenSeed VC, Defined, and a handful of family offices and angels.

This new funding will accelerate the development of Outpost Bio’s experimental and modelling platforms. It will help pharmaceutical, food, and consumer health players find a new way to predict how drugs and ingredients interact with our microbiome.

Building models that finally reflect how biology really works

Leading the company is Dr Jenny Yang, co-founder and CEO, with a PhD from Oxford and a background as a Marie Curie Fellow in clinical machine learning. She teamed up with Alex Merwin, COO and ex-Head of Growth for Health and Bio Startups at AWS, to launch Outpost Bio.

In a conversation with TFN, Yang shares, “I’ve spent my career working on AI for personalised medicine, primarily focused on human genomics. Genomics has transformed how we understand disease, but it still doesn’t explain why two patients with the same mutation, diagnosis, and treatment can respond so differently – and clinical trial failure rates remain high. I became increasingly convinced we’re missing a critical layer: the trillions of microbes that live alongside us.”

“Every drug/intervention ultimately interacts with these microbes, which can metabolise and transform compounds in ways that affect efficacy and toxicity. While human genomes are largely similar, microbiomes vary dramatically. If we want true precision medicine, we have to understand how microbial communities shape drug response, and that realisation is what led to the founding of Outpost Bio,” she adds. 

Outpost Bio’s Lab-in-the-Loop platform blends high-throughput microbiome testing with adaptive machine learning, building models that finally move beyond correlation to uncover real cause-and-effect.

“Our lab-in-the-loop platform generates large-scale, high-throughput datasets capturing how diverse human-derived microbial communities metabolise chemical compounds. We then train AI models to predict functional outcomes, not just microbial composition,” Yang elaborates.

Every experiment makes the system smarter, sharpening its predictions over time. With one of the largest datasets available, Outpost Bio can simulate how microbes affect drug metabolism, toxicity, and efficacy with greater accuracy.

Yang adds, “Our focus is high-throughput experimental systems paired with AI, making this layer measurable, scalable, and usable for R&D teams. That combination of scalable interaction data and predictive modelling is what sets us apart.”

Pharma partners can use these models to de-risk clinical development and build safer products, while food and consumer brands get a window into how their ingredients shift our microbial communities.

While most microbiome startups chase diagnostics, probiotics, or genomic mapping, Outpost Bio is all-in on computational modelling and function prediction. Its edge is fusing lab automation with causal model building, turning microbiology into a true computational science.

What about diversity, and what is it like being female in tech?

On diversity, Yang notes, “Our founding team consists of five members — three men and two women, including myself as CEO and our VP of R&D. Our advisory board is also a diverse group of male and female leaders spanning microbiology, AI, and biotech commercialisation.”

On being female in tech, Yang tells TFN, “I’ve felt incredibly fortunate in my career. I’ve often been supported by mentors, investors, and colleagues who evaluated me based on the strength of the work. At the same time, I’ve been aware of being one of the few women in certain rooms. You do occasionally encounter scepticism, but I’ve learned that the most important confidence is the one you build yourself – by putting in the time, doing the hard work, and deeply understanding your craft. I’ve also been lucky to stand on the shoulders of women who came before me – and many alongside me – who navigated even tougher environments so the path could be wider for the rest of us. I feel a responsibility not to pull the ladder up behind me.”

“My advice is to invest in building real competence and conviction. Confidence grounded in mastery is resilient. Stay passionate about what you care about, build with intention, and help leave the path wider for those who come after you,” Yang adds.

What’s next for Outpost Bio?

With fresh funding in hand, the team is set to expand wet-lab facilities and scale up their machine learning platform over the next 18 months. Priorities include more pharma and consumer health partnerships, building regulatory evidence frameworks, and expanding their datasets to include new types of human-derived microbiota.

Looking ahead, the company sees microbiology as a design field that enables researchers and product developers to simulate how microbes respond to drugs, nutrients, and environmental factors before testing compounds in the lab.