Outpost Bio raises €2.9m for microbiology platform

Outpost Bio has raised €2.9m (US$3.5m) in pre-seed funding to develop a platform aimed at making human microbiology computable.

The London and Boston-based startup, founded in 2025 by Dr Jenny Yang and Alex Merwin, says it is working to decode interactions between microbes and human biology that it believes are often overlooked by existing biological models.

The company says most frontier biological models focus on elements encoded in human DNA. However, many biological processes arise from interactions between multiple biological systems.

Outpost Bio’s platform aims to address this by modelling what it calls the “interaction layer”, focusing on human microbiology, the study of micro-organisms that live in and on the human body.

Its Lab-in-the-Loop platform combines automated laboratory experiments with machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that enables computer systems to improve as they process data. The platform creates a feedback loop in which models learn from experiments and guide what should be tested next.

The company says this approach generates proprietary human-derived functional data at scale, which it claims could help pharmaceutical partners reduce risk in clinical development, design safer formulations and support regulatory evidence. It also says food and consumer companies could use the system to test how prebiotics, botanicals and other ingredients affect microbial communities.

The startup says its platform could help partners developing molecules intended for use in or on the human body predict microbe-mediated metabolism, toxicity and response.

Dr Yang, co-founder and chief executive, holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and is a former Marie Curie Fellow with a background in clinical machine learning.

Co-founder and chief operating officer Alex Merwin previously served as head of growth for health and bio startups at AWS.

The pre-seed funding round was co-led by Merantix Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from OpenSeed VC, Defined and strategic family offices and angel investors.

Dr Yang said: “We’re building what we believe to be the most comprehensive dataset in human microbiology.

“Microbial communities can dramatically alter drugs and other interventions, yet this layer has been largely ignored because the data hasn’t existed at scale.

“For the first time, we can move beyond correlations to reveal causal pathways.”

Adrian Locher, co-founder and general partner at Merantix Capital, added: “What took decades to build for earlier biological models can now be achieved in years.

“Faster wet-lab data generation, lower sequencing costs, and more powerful machine learning make this the right moment to build predictive models of the microbes that live within and on us.”

With the new funding, Outpost Bio plans to expand its experimental and modelling platforms as it seeks to develop new approaches to designing drugs, ingredients and consumer health products.