17. März 2026 #NEWatLSN: Galagos

Vision & Mission

Galagos is building the virtual bioinformatician – an AI-powered platform that enables researchers and organizations in pharma, biotech, and clinical research to analyze complex biological data through natural language. Our mission is to make expert-level bioinformatics accessible to every life science team, regardless of their computational resources. We believe that the bottleneck in biomedical research shouldn't be the availability of bioinformatics expertise, but the ambition of the scientific questions being asked.

How Galagos came about

Galagos was founded in 2025 in Hamburg by Alexander Zahn (CEO), Dr. Fernando Delgado (CTO), Dr. Michael Hartung (CPO), and Prof. Dr. Jan Baumbach (CSO). Together, the team brings together deep expertise in entrepreneurship and strategy, generative AI, full-stack development, and computational systems biology – along with decades of experience in bioinformatics research, published tools used by thousands of researchers worldwide, and hands-on pharmaceutical industry collaboration. We are currently a small, focused team supported by the EXIST program (BMWK/ESF Plus), building our product at the intersection of generative AI and computational biology.

Why Life Science Nord?

Northern Germany is home to a vibrant and growing life science ecosystem – from university hospitals and research institutes to biotech startups and established pharma companies. As a Hamburg-based company, joining Life Science Nord was a natural step. We see LSN as the ideal platform to connect with potential partners and customers across the full spectrum of the life science value chain, to contribute our AI and bioinformatics expertise to collaborative projects, and to help strengthen Hamburg's and Northern Germany's position as a hub for digital health and computational life sciences.

Products & Added Value

Our core product, the Galagos Agent, automates complex bioinformatics workflows – from omics data analysis and pathway enrichment to literature-informed biological interpretation – through a conversational AI interface. Instead of waiting weeks for a bioinformatician's availability or investing in building an in-house team, research groups and companies can use Galagos to get expert-quality analyses in a fraction of the time. We offer deployment models tailored to enterprise needs, including on-premises options for organizations with strict data governance requirements.

Expertise in Action

A good example of our capabilities is our work with clinical research organizations analyzing patient cohort data. In projects like these, Galagos enables researchers to go from raw molecular data to publishable biological insights – integrating multiple data modalities, applying established bioinformatics best practices, and generating comprehensive scientific reports – all orchestrated through natural language interaction with our AI agent. This kind of acceleration is particularly valuable in translational research, where time-to-insight can directly impact patient outcomes.

And why "Galagos"?

Galagos – also known as bushbabies – are small nocturnal primates native to sub-Saharan Africa. Despite their tiny size, they are remarkably agile: they can leap up to 2.25 meters in a single bound, navigate complex canopies in near-total darkness thanks to their enormous eyes, and track insects mid-flight with their bat-like ears. We chose the name because it captures exactly what our AI does: it navigates vast, complex biological datasets with agility and precision, spots patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed, and works tirelessly through the "darkness" of high-dimensional data – all while being surprisingly small and efficient. Plus, much like the galagos themselves, our platform may be compact, but it punches far above its weight.