BioRender Launches Leo AI Agent and Expands Engineering and Sales Roles

BioRender, the Toronto-based scientific visual communication platform, has introduced Leo, an AI agent designed to help researchers build publication-ready scientific illustrations. According to BetaKit, the agent guides researchers through planning, sketching, and generating figures using domain-vetted icons and layered outputs rather than single text-to-image prompts.

The release follows an October partnership with Anthropic to integrate BioRender’s icon library into Claude for Life Sciences, as well as a secondary investment from biotech investor Dimension Capital in December 2025 that valued the startup at $900 million. Operating profitably since 2019, the 205-person company is expanding its team with remote roles spanning security governance, product prototyping, and enterprise expansion across North America and Europe.

Standardizing Visual Language for Life Sciences

Founded in 2017 out of Y Combinator's W18 batch, BioRender produces a web-based visualization tool described by its founders as a standard visual language for biology. Life science researchers historically drew biological mechanisms, pathway figures, and experimental workflows across tools like PowerPoint and Illustrator, leading to inconsistent styling and heavy manual design effort. BioRender provides an infinite canvas paired with a library of more than 50,000 scientifically vetted life science icons and templates covering molecular interactions, cell types, lab equipment, and disease pathways.

The platform has expanded beyond static illustrations into collaborative figure creation, graphing tools, chemistry structures through a PubChem integration, and protein models through a Protein Data Bank (PDB) plugin. Figures built on the platform serve journal submissions, grant proposals, conference posters, and lab presentations. The company's customer base includes all 30 top pharmaceutical firms, more than 4,000,000 scientists, and 15 Nobel Prize-winning labs.

Founder Leadership and Company Origins

BioRender was co-founded by CEO Shiz Aoki, CTO Katya Shteyn, and co-founder Ryan Marien.

Aoki spent nearly a decade as lead science illustrator at National Geographic and founded a medical illustration studio in Toronto after earning a master's degree in medical and biological illustration from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Shteyn completed her B.Sc. in computer science at the University of Toronto before leading engineering as CTO. Marien, who holds an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge, previously co-founded Canadian e-commerce company Buytopia.

In a talk at TechTO, Marien noted that after launching at YC in 2018 with an initial Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 10, the founding team spent 12 months working closely with users until the product reached an NPS of 80. The company returned to Toronto to access specialized medical illustration and engineering talent while selling internationally, reaching profitability in 2019 with no external board.

The Leo Architecture and Figure Workflow

BioRender developed Leo to tackle the inaccuracies and hallucinations common in general-purpose text-to-image generative models. "Scientists can’t rely on them because they treat scientific figures the way they would any other type of illustration," Aoki told BetaKit. "Instead, it provides scientists with actual figure-making expertise, asking questions, offering sketches, and building images that a researcher can continue to refine by hand."

In a live product demonstration on YouTube, Aoki walked through how the agent operates:

1. Clarifying Questions: Leo analyzes the user's initial prompt or uploaded diagram, identifying missing scientific elements and asking structured follow-up questions before spending AI compute.
2. Conceptual Sketches: The agent offers layout sketches to determine visual hierarchy, reading order, and story flow.
3. Interactive Markup: Users can draw directly on generated color drafts with visual markup tools to refine specific structural features, such as lengthening cell structures or modifying membrane boundaries.
4. Smart Layer Output: Instead of exporting flattened pixels, Leo compiles figures into editable vectors and smart layers, allowing researchers to tweak labels, adjust colors, and move components into presentation software without re-prompting.

Open Remote Roles at BioRender

BioRender is currently hiring for four fully remote roles across the United States and Canada, reflecting the company’s dual focus on AI integration and enterprise revenue.

On the product and engineering side, the company is looking for a Director of Security ($200,000 – $300,000 USD). This director will lead the security team, setting vision and governance models as BioRender integrates AI into development and customer-facing products, while tailoring compliance strategies for research-intensive enterprise clients handling sensitive data. The company is also recruiting a Product Builder, a Founder Track role ($150,000 – $250,000 USD) to work alongside the founders, using AI-assisted coding tools to prototype features that solve lab workflows.

On the commercial side, the team is adding a Business Development Representative ($50,000 – $60,000 CAD) to qualify inbound requests, prospect new leads, and build pitches based on platform features. Higher in the sales funnel, an Enterprise Account Executive will manage the full sales cycle, driving expansion and account growth across academic institutions and commercial biotech firms in North America and Europe.

See all open roles at BioRender