Yaoyu Yang is the Founder and CEO of Cypher AI, an AI-native infrastructure platform built to supercharge scientific productivity and transform how life science R&D is executed.

Yaoyu earned his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Washington in 2016, where he researched synthetic biology and lab automation, before spending nearly eight years at Ginkgo Bioworks as a Principal Software Engineer.

Yaoyu bridges deep scientific expertise with software engineering, having been recognized with Ginkgo's prestigious Redwood Award in 2021 for his outsized impact in building the Ginkgo Foundry Platform.

At Cypher AI, Yaoyu is replacing fragmented legacy lab tools with a unified, AI-native platform that consolidates experiment design, workflow orchestration, data management, and vendor coordination for biotech and pharma teams.

Since launching in 2025, Cypher AI has secured $2M in seed funding led by MaC Venture Capital, attracted over 800 active scientists, and powered more than 100,000 lab and computational workflows on the platform.