The Team
The people building Cypher AI.
Three people in Cambridge, MA. Research depth and systems engineering, applied to the software layer underneath the bench.
Yaoyu Yang
Co-Founder & CEO
Yaoyu spent several years building research tooling for computational biology labs in the Cambridge area before founding Cypher AI in 2025. He saw the patchwork problem from the inside — the scripts no one else could run, the protocols that lived only in a postdoc's memory — and decided to build the layer that fixes it structurally.
Mara Holt
Research Scientist
PhD in molecular biology, with dissertation work focused on experimental reproducibility in high-throughput assay development. At Cypher AI, Mara translates real wet-lab workflows — western blots, ELISA, flow cytometry panels — into the protocol models and data schemas that power the platform.
Rajan Nair
Platform Engineer
ML systems background with prior experience shipping low-latency inference infrastructure. Builds the sandboxed code execution environment and the agent runtime that writes and runs analysis tools on demand — the technical core of the AI Agent module.
We are early and building fast. Want to work on this?
We are interested in people who have worked in research environments and have strong opinions about why current lab software falls short. Background in life sciences, ML systems, or developer tooling — ideally some overlap.
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