Stately Bio, a biotech startup founded by an ex-Google ML engineer, raises $12M for AI-powered cell imaging platform

For years, scientists trying to understand cells have been stuck with a frustrating trade-off: if you want to know what a cell is doing, you usually have to kill it. That’s been a major roadblock for regenerative medicine and cell therapy development—fields that rely on tracking how cells behave, evolve, and mature over time.

Stately Bio is working to change that. The Palo Alto-based biotech startup has built a live-cell imaging platform powered by machine learning that monitors how cells function in real time, without needing to stain them, tag them, or crack them open.

Today, Stately Bio announced it has raised $12 million in seed funding to scale its platform and expand its pipeline of stem cell-derived therapies. The round was led by AIX Ventures, with support from Dimension Capital, Foothill Ventures, Village Global, and notable angel investors including Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, Carbon Health co-founder Tom Berry, and ITA Software co-founder Jeremy Wertheimer.

Founded in 2022 by Frank Li, formerly the principal ML engineer at Google’s Calico Labs, Stately Bio brings a rare mix of AI and biology under one roof. Li is joined by a team with deep expertise from places like MIT’s Broad Institute, Stanford’s stem cell institute, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, and National Resilience.

Stately’s approach solves a big pain point in cell therapy: the lack of non-destructive tools for measuring cell quality. Traditionally, to assess whether a stem cell has matured into a liver cell—or any other target cell—researchers need to break it apart and measure internal molecules. That method is slow, expensive, and most importantly, one-and-done. Once the cell is tested, it’s gone. That makes it nearly impossible to monitor progress or optimize results at scale.

With Stately Bio’s platform, researchers can now analyze live cells on the fly, in bulk, and without harming them. The system captures high-resolution images and uses machine learning models to classify cell types, track their development, and even predict manufacturing outcomes. No fluorescent tags, no genetic tinkering—just pure observation and inference.

For drugmakers and biomanufacturers, that means faster development timelines, better quality control, and more reliable production of cell-based therapies. On the discovery side, it opens new doors for building more functional and potent cell lines.

The company is already seeing early wins. In collaboration with the New York Blood Center (NYBC), Stately’s imaging platform identified immune cell subpopulations faster and more precisely than conventional tools like flow cytometry. That validation helped them win the Top Scoring Start-Up (Enabler) Abstract Award at the upcoming ISCT 2025 conference.

Stately’s internal liver program also shows serious promise. The company has developed stem cell–derived liver cells that outperform existing tech by 3x to 10x across key metabolic assays. They’re now looking to broaden the platform to other cell types and explore partnerships in areas like toxicity screening, disease modeling, and therapeutic applications.

“Stately Bio is fundamentally reshaping our understanding of cell therapies by decoding living cell states in real-time, all without invasive methods,” said Krish Ramadurai, partner at AIX Ventures. “This approach addresses a critical bottleneck that has long limited breakthroughs in regenerative medicine.”

Founder Frank Li puts it even more directly: “At Stately Bio, we’re unlocking the power to decode cellular behaviors previously invisible to science. This seed funding allows us to scale our technology and make cell therapies faster to develop, more affordable, and accessible to all.”

With a fresh $12 million in the bank and growing validation across partners and programs, Stately Bio is positioning itself as one of the key players helping push regenerative medicine out of the lab and into the clinic.