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Rhizome AI

Agent Platform for Life Sciences

It takes 500,000 days of office work to bring a drug to market. We want to make it 5. To get there, we need agents doing most of the work. Today, our research agent is the best way to know what the FDA thinks. Users ask a question and get an answer backed by up to 1,000 documents, where each statement has a citation. It’s the best because we have the best retrieval engine. We’ve tuned it on our life science-specific dataset, and we find what others miss. As more teams use Rhizome, we gain more data on what regulatory professionals actually need, which makes retrieval even better. This flywheel is how we become the retrieval engine that powers all human and agent work in life sciences. Chetan started his career as a research engineer, but quickly realized he enjoyed building more than research. He joined EvolutionaryScale as their sole founding product engineer, launching their developer-scientist platform and scaling to tens of thousands of users and billions of API calls. He was also #16 at Instabase helping banks with document processing, closing $7m as the technical closer. Agents can do magical things today, but most in life sciences only use them to edit emails. Agents are missing the context they need to 100x the number of drugs we can bring to market. Rhizome AI is focused on that critical problem.
Active Founders
Chetan Mishra
Chetan Mishra
Founder
Building an agent platform for life sciences. Software engineer who's closed millions in enterprise deals - $7m in technical close at Instabase - co-author of a paper on the cover of science magazine (esm3) - first used vector db's in 2016 for image retrieval
Company Launches
Rhizome AI - Know what the FDA thinks
See original launch post

Hi all - I’m Chetan, the founder of Rhizome AI.

Tl;dr

What has the FDA’s feedback been on real world evidence in review comments?

We help life science companies know what the FDA thinks.

Regulatory affairs teams ask a question and get an answer backed by terabytes of regulatory & clinical databases from the US, EU, etc.

Unlike ChatGPT, Rhizome reads up to 1,000 documents per question, accompanies each statement with a citation, and doesn’t hallucinate.

Ask: If you know any biotech or medtech leaders (esp if they’re regulatory affairs or R&D), I’d appreciate an intro!

Ultimately we want all reg affairs teams to be as informed as the most regulatory man in the world.

😖 The problem: Knowing what the FDA thinks

The FDA is the customer of every function in life sciences. It doesn’t matter whether you are regulatory affairs, R&D, quality, manufacturing, commercial, etc.

At the same time, it’s difficult to understand their thinking. Guidance documents are high level and vague. The only alternative is doing (or paying a consultant to do) manual, painful research on past decisions they’ve made and understand why. Other regulators around the globe are no easier.

ChatGPT / Claude / etc. have only made it worse

  • They trust their knowledge and only look up what they feel the need to. This means low-latency, but high-hallucination research
  • Even when they retrieve sources, at most, it’s a few dozen. It’s also liable to include lots of internet junk mixed in with the authoritative government databases the industry trusts
  • They don’t make it easy to check citations. They cite a 1200 page PDF and you don’t really know where to dig inside it.

✨ The Solution: Hallucination-free, deep research for life sciences

Rhizome Ask solves this problem by providing hallucination-free and thorough deep research for the life sciences. There’s a few key things our customers like:

  • We didn’t have a single hallucination reported in 2025.
  • Every statement comes with a citation
  • We read up to 1,000 documents per question in a few minutes before writing an answer. We’re continuously extending this limit.

Here’s a quick peek at the product:

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Our customers love it. A few testimonials:

  • Last time we did this research, we spent weeks. Rhizome found the answer immediately.” - a VP of reg affairs at a clinical-stage biotech
  • “Chetan idk what kind of magic you all did here, it’s so good” - a VP of reg affairs at a biotech with multiple products on the market
  • “I would cry if I lost access to Rhizome” - an RA manager at a drug delivery device company
  • 10 minutes of work can accomplish what would have taken weeks.” a device engineer at a pharma company

🤝 Who am I

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A bit about my background.

I joined EvolutionaryScale as their first product engineer, launching an AI inference platform to help scientists design proteins. I joined Instabase as #16 helping banks with document & imaging processing, closing $7m as the technical lead.

When looking to start my own company, I realized we saw many AI startups focused on drug discovery, but a lot less attention bringing those products to market.

🙏 My ask: Connections with regulatory affairs, quality, or R&D leaders in life sciences

Do you know any regulatory affairs, quality, or R&D leaders in life sciences? It would be awesome to chat with them!

Other ways you can help:

  • Follow us on Linkedin
  • Share this post with your friends / family in life sciences!
  • Learn more about us at rhizomeai.com
YC Photos
Rhizome AI
Founded:2025
Batch:Winter 2026
Team Size:1
Status:
Active
Primary Partner:Tyler Bosmeny