Outpost Bio Raises £2.6M Pre-Seed to Build Predictive Models of Human Microbiology for Drug and Product Development

March 2, 2026

Outpost Bio, the London-based human microbiology modelling company, raised £2.6 million in a pre-seed round in March 2026, co-led by Merantix Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from OpenSeed VC, Defined, and strategic family offices and angel investors. The funding will accelerate development of Outpost Bio’s experimental platform and machine learning models. The company was co-founded by Dr Jenny Yang and Alex Merwin. Yang holds a PhD from Oxford and was a Marie Curie Fellow, with a background spanning clinical machine learning and microbiome research. Merwin was formerly Head of Growth for Health and Bio Startups at Amazon Web Services. The founding team also includes senior leaders in microbiology, data engineering, and machine learning, with scientific advisors from Ginkgo Bioworks, the Genome Sciences Centre, and DARPA.

The human microbiome — the community of trillions of microorganisms living in and on the human body, concentrated in the gut but present across every surface and cavity — has become one of the most scientifically productive areas in biomedical research over the past decade. What has emerged from this research is a picture of extraordinary complexity: the microbiome metabolises drugs at rates that vary dramatically between individuals, transforming some compounds into active therapeutic agents and deactivating others; it synthesises vitamins, neurotransmitters, and signalling molecules; it interacts with the immune system in ways that affect inflammatory disease, allergy, and cancer immunotherapy response; and it processes dietary components in ways that determine much of the nutritional value individuals derive from their food. The practical implications for drug development, nutrition science, and consumer health are significant: a compound that works as intended in 70% of a clinical trial population and fails or causes harm in 30% may be doing so largely because of inter-individual microbiome variation — variation that is currently invisible to most R&D processes.

Outpost Bio’s platform is designed to make this invisible layer computable. The company integrates automated wet-lab experimentation with machine learning in a closed feedback loop, generating human-derived functional data at scale — characterising how specific microbial communities respond to and metabolise specific compounds across a range of conditions. This enables pharmaceutical partners to de-risk clinical development by testing how drug candidates interact with representative microbiome compositions before entering trials; formulation teams to design products that work with rather than against microbial communities; and food and consumer companies to evaluate how ingredients affect gut microbiome composition and function. The goal, as Yang has described it, is to build the most comprehensive functional dataset in human microbiology — moving beyond the correlational data that has characterised most microbiome research to date toward causal, mechanistic understanding that is directly useful in product and drug development.

Merantix Capital General Partner Adrian Locher identified the timing as critical: faster wet-lab data generation, lower sequencing costs, and more powerful machine learning have converged to make it possible now to build predictive models of human microbiology that would have taken decades using previous approaches. Seedcamp Partner Tom Wilson described the founding team as combining deep microbiology, machine learning, and company-building experience in a combination that is unusual in the academic-spinout landscape. The investor base — spanning European deep-tech venture in Merantix and Seedcamp, alongside specialist biotech angels and family offices — reflects the genuinely cross-disciplinary nature of the company’s approach.

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