The bottleneck is storytelling. We're building the commons that fixes it.

TEAM

Sean Jungbluth, PhD

CEO / CTO, Founder

Anthropic Claude Community Ambassador

Microbial genomicist building computational and AI tooling for environmental biology. Lectures sometimes at Stanford on microbial genomics; previously studied deep-sea and subsurface microbial diversity across three submersible expeditions to ~2,650 m. Author of open-source pipelines and a contributor to FAIR data standards (MIxS, MIEM).

Michelle Jungbluth, PhD

CSO, Co-Founder

Marine and estuarine ecologist focused on zooplankton communities and food-web dynamics. Combines field sampling with DNA barcoding, eDNA, qPCR, and metabarcoding to track threatened estuarine fishes — including longfin smelt — and identify indicator species in human-impacted wetlands. Lead investigator on BioKEA's San Francisco Bay metabarcoding baseline.

Austin Baker, PhD

Founding Research Scientist

Entomologist and biodiversity scientist managing the California Insect Barcoding Initiative — over 1 million specimens barcoded, with recent work estimating that at least one third of the state's insect biodiversity remains undiscovered. Previously a postdoctoral scholar at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. PhD on parasitoid-wasp systematics.

ADVISORS

Sunit Jain, MS

Advisor

Bioinformatics scientist with 13+ years building agentic, multi-agent systems for microbial-community analysis. Author of Colloquip.

Greg Fedewa, PhD

Advisor

Bioinformatics scientist (Caltech, Centre for Pathogen Evolution) developing computational methods for immunological and antigenic data analysis.

Programs & support

BioKEA is supported by leading cloud and AI infrastructure programs that supply the compute and credits behind the LDC and BioinfoOS.

AWS for Startups · Google Cloud for Startups · NVIDIA Inception

RECOGNITION

Sean Jungbluth was named a winner of Anthropic's Built with Claude Sonnet 4.5 Challenge (October 2025) for DaKineDiving, a real-time dive intelligence platform for O'ahu. See press kit + coverage.

PARTNERS

• California Institute for Biodiversity — Bay Area nonprofit coordinating biodiversity research, specimen curation, and field inventories across California.
• San Francisco Estuary Institute — Independent research institute focused on the ecology, water quality, and habitat of the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary.
• Coastal Quest — California-based nonprofit supporting coastal stewardship, conservation, and habitat restoration.

MILESTONES

1. 2025-03

   BioKEA founded

   Biology Knowledge Exploration Assistant — spin-out from biodiversity and environmental omics research, accelerated by revolutionary AI tooling.

2. 2025-04

   Agentis started

   AI-reviewed science journal conceived.

3. 2025-09

   Berkeley lab planning begins

   Start planning the 5,000+ sq ft Berkeley lab space.

4. 2025-10

   Built with Claude Sonnet 4.5 Challenge — winner

   Sean wins Anthropic's Built with Claude Sonnet 4.5 Challenge with DaKineDiving, a real-time dive intelligence platform for O'ahu.

5. 2025-11

   Contracts begin; ONT Promethion 2 arrives

   Major new contracts begin and the Oxford Nanopore Promethion 2 sequencer lands on site.

6. 2026-02

   Sean becomes Anthropic Claude Community Ambassador

   Sean joins the Claude Community Ambassador program, deepening BioKEA's ties to the Anthropic developer community.

7. 2026-03

   Move into Berkeley space

   Team takes possession of the 5,000+ sq ft Berkeley lab.

8. 2026-04

   First employee hired

   Founding team expands, the first salaried hire joins the team.

COMMITMENT

Built for the commons, by design.

BioKEA's outputs are public goods. The science we publish belongs to the commons; the infrastructure that produces it is open by design. We chose FAIR as our output format and AT Protocol as our publishing medium because the alternative is a science whose claims you can't trust, on infrastructure you can't audit. The science is only as valuable as the trust people can place in it.