Vivodyne builds robotic labs to improve AI drug discovery

Vivodyne, a biotech startup spun out of the University of Pennsylvania, says the AI drug‑discovery field lacks the causal human biological data needed to train useful models and has built HIVE — modular robotic labs that grow human tissues, autonomously dose and monitor them, and generate longitudinal experimental data. The company claims its tissues achieve high concordance with human trial outcomes (e.g., liver 94%, airway 96%, bone marrow 100% on tested chemotherapies), has raised just under $80 million across two rounds led by Khosla Ventures, and last week opened what it calls the world’s largest “human data center” near San Francisco to scale throughput and feed AI research. Vivodyne positions its dataset as a way to enable causal, reinforcement‑learning style models for more predictive human biology and combination‑therapy design.