Potato AI is a Seattle-based startup founded by Ryan Kosai and Nick Edwards, who aim to revolutionize the scientific research process by providing an AI scientific research assistant. The company recently announced a $1 million pre-seed round of funding and is the first partner in an AI program created by Wiley, a prominent academic and education publishing company. The platform uses chat-based, generative-AI tools and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to help researchers plan and run experiments more efficiently. Potato’s platform is already being used in labs at biotech companies and universities such as University of Washington, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and more.
Nick Edwards, Potato’s CEO, has a background in neuroscience research and has experienced firsthand the challenges of navigating through research publications to develop research protocols. Potato’s tool can critique journal articles, help researchers write papers for publication, and assist in reviews of journal submissions by identifying shortcomings in protocols and suggesting improvements. The platform aims to help researchers streamline the process of distilling scientific content and designing repeatable experiments in order to accelerate the journey to medical breakthroughs.
Potato AI is unique in its focus on actively assisting researchers in planning and conducting experiments, as opposed to simply digesting and summarizing published research like other AI research tools. The company aims to expand its AI assistant to aid research in materials science and chemistry in addition to biology and medicine. Scientists can join the platform for free for limited use, with the option to pay for additional services and information access to enhance collaborations. The startup has already garnered interest from investors including Axial, Pioneer Square Labs, AI2 Incubator, Bow Capital, and notable angel investors such as Jeff Hammerbacher and Jesse Rothstein.
A key challenge for Potato AI is ensuring the accuracy of the AI-generated results and guarding against errors or hallucinations. The company is implementing fact-checking processes and allowing users to query the tool for more information or refer back to the source documents. The platform’s goal is to help researchers discover subtle yet impactful tweaks to protocols that can lead to groundbreaking discoveries. By leveraging AI technology and scientific literature references, Potato AI aims to address the reproducibility crisis in scientific research and facilitate faster progress in the field of biotechnology and medicine.
Potato AI’s co-founders, Ryan Kosai and Nick Edwards, bring a wealth of experience in technology, entrepreneurship, and scientific research to the table. Kosai serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer, with a background in fintech startups and startup studios, while Edwards, as the CEO, has a PhD in neuroscience and has conducted research at prestigious institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and UC San Diego. With their combined expertise and vision for improving the scientific research process, Potato AI is poised to make a significant impact in the field of research and contribute to the advancement of medical breakthroughs and discoveries.
