Biotech pharma

b12 Labs

Website
Founded 2025Origin source ↗Checked 2026-09-15

Overview

b12 makes high-value molecules that are otherwise hard to make. We help pharma companies plan and make new drugs, accelerating early-stage drug discovery from years to months.

Andres built the first AI agent that can autonomously think and make molecules in a robotic lab, published in Nature Machine Intelligence (1000+ citations), and won the best paper award at the NeurIPS AI for Science conference.

Zlatko is a 3x National Chemistry Olympiad champion, competed at IChO level, and medicinal chemist who has worked at Roche and leading lab robotics companies.

Combined, we have an extensive network of hundreds of chemists, automation scientists, and AI 4 Science researchers.

We run paid pilots with big pharma companies, demonstrating that our platform planned a set of experiments that achieved full conversion in a single attempt, eliminating the iteration cycle.

Company description As recorded 2026-11-08
About
Biotech pharmaAI agentBusinessesEnterpriseServices

Product & workflow

Selenium, Palladium, and Cobalt are available as software tools at app.b12-labs.com, so teams can start with the part of the workflow they need.

Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-23

Founders & team

Previously B12, b-12

Company history As recorded 2026-11-08

Zlatko Jončev

Founder/CEO

at b-12 we are developing AI agents for automated workflows in chemistry and pharma R&D, as a way of manifestating chemical super intelligence in physical world. our long-term goal is to create autonomous labs that can perform complex, multistep syntheses with minimal human intervention.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15

Andres Bran

Founder/CTO

Before b-12, Andres built the first AI agent to plan and make molecules in a robotic lab (750+ cites in Nature Machine Intelligence, and Best Paper at NeurIPS AI for Science), along with several other works in agents and LLMs for chemistry (1100+ citations). He was an Intern at Max Planck (Math in Science), and PhD at EPFL (AI+Chemistry). Automation is the future of chemistry, but integration and human operability is the hidden demon nobody talks about. We're fixing that at b-12.

LinkedIn X
Founder profile As recorded 2026-09-15
3team members reported
Source-reported As recorded 2026-09-15

Founded 2025 · Source

Origins

Andres and Zlatko met at EPFL, while working in the Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence. Zlatko was doing his postdoc and Andres was doing his PhD.

Founder account As recorded 2026-09-15

News & product activity

Sources & observations

Y Combinator

Profile depthverified profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedSan Francisco, CA, USA
Pricing evidenceNo pricing page confirmed
Maturity: Not assessed · 3 of 6 areas documented

Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules

The retained text does not establish product availability or customer use.

Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.

Stage definitions
independent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding year
startup.observe Directory coverage · Sources & method