# b12 Labs

> b12 Labs is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator S25) building AI agents for pharmaceutical and biotech chemistry. Its platform designs synthesis routes, plans and optimizes reactions, and turns those plans into robot-ready code for automated labs, aiming to compress early-stage drug discovery from years to months. The company was founded in 2025 by chemists Zlatko Joncev and Andres Bran, who met at EPFL's Lab of Artificial Chemical Intelligence.

- **Founded:** 2025
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founders:** Zlatko Joncev (Co-Founder & CEO), Andres Bran (Co-Founder)
- **Team size:** 3
- **Products:** Selenium (Retrosynthesis), Palladium (Condition Optimization), Cobalt (Lab Automation)
- **Notable:** Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch, Launched publicly via Launch YC as a 'Chemistry Copilot for Pharma & Biotech' (2025), Co-founder Andres Bran built an early AI agent for autonomous molecular planning, published in Nature Machine Intelligence (750+ citations) and awarded Best Paper at NeurIPS AI for Science

## Products & services

- **Selenium (Retrosynthesis)** — Analyzes a target molecule and generates ranked synthesis strategies with step-by-step route breakdowns and confidence metrics.
- **Palladium (Condition Optimization)** — Designs high-throughput screening experiments, optimizing catalysts, ligands, bases, and solvents - often on a single plate.
- **Cobalt (Lab Automation)** — Converts optimized experimental conditions into automation-ready protocols and robot code for platforms like Chemspeed and Opentrons.

## Achievements

- Accepted into Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch
- Launched publicly via Launch YC as a 'Chemistry Copilot for Pharma & Biotech' (2025)
- Co-founder Andres Bran built an early AI agent for autonomous molecular planning, published in Nature Machine Intelligence (750+ citations) and awarded Best Paper at NeurIPS AI for Science
- Co-founder Zlatko Joncev: 3x top finisher at Serbia's National Chemistry Competition and International Chemistry Olympiad participant; published work on atroposelective synthesis (Angewandte Chemie 2022) and LLM-based retrosynthesis (Matter 2026)

## Latest updates

- **2025-08** — b12 Labs launched on Launch YC as a chemistry copilot for pharma and biotech.
- **2025-08** — Reported first funding (~$130K, Seed) tied to the Y Combinator S25 batch.
- **2026-01** — Company associated with an SLAS 2026 booth presence (lab automation industry event).

## Links

- Website: https://b12-labs.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b12labs
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/b12Labs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmf7q-Sie2o

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/b12-labs-yc-s25
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-31