Asteromorph Raises $31.4M Seed Round to Build Scientific Superintelligence

Asteromorph, a Seoul-based AI research startup developing what it calls scientific superintelligence, has closed a seed round totaling $31.4M (KRW 47 billion), bringing its cumulative seed funding to that amount after a previously disclosed $3.45M(KRW 5 billion) raise. The latest round was led by BonAngels Venture Partners, with participation from Futureplay, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, IMM Investment, Premier Partners, KDB(Korea Development Bank), KDB Capital, SV Investment, and STIC Ventures.

The company is building autonomous scientific systems capable of handling the entire research process within a defined domain. At the core of these systems is Spacer, an AI foundation model that combines deep domain knowledge with multi-step reasoning to independently generate research ideas and develop scientific hypotheses in biology and chemistry. Where conventional AI tools still rely on human intuition to drive originality in experimental design, Spacer is designed to perform that creative leap on its own — a mathematical approach to ideation that Asteromorph argues represents a fundamental departure from existing AI scientist models.

The company’s flagship initiative, called the Library Project, aims to run these autonomous systems at scale to uncover the fundamental mechanisms of life, building the results into a structured database it calls the Library.

Asteromorph was founded by Minhyeong Lee, who began his career as a researcher at Seoul National University’s College of Medicine at age 16 and later entered the university’s integrated master’s-doctoral program in pharmaceutical sciences — bypassing both high school and undergraduate study — before taking a leave of absence to start the company. The research team is composed primarily of scientists in their twenties drawn from Seoul Science High School, Seoul National University, and the ranks of international science olympiad winners.