Tools for understanding the places we care for.
Molecular Intelligence Institute is a nonprofit building open tools for environmental DNA, working alongside tribes, land trusts, and scientists.
Why we exist
the people who
know the places.
Environmental DNA can tell a community what lives in its waters and lands.
But the tools to read it are often expensive, closed, or built without the people who know those places best. We're building open alternatives, with those people, on their terms.
Why a nonprofit.
Some work doesn't fit a product business: open tools anyone can use, building at the pace of trust, supporting programs that can't pay license fees. That work needs grants and philanthropy, so we're organized as a nonprofit and report on it in public.
What we do
Shared standards
So results from one place can be compared with another.
Open analysis tools
Software for reading what's in a sample, free to inspect and use.
Plain-language reports
Answers a steward can act on, not a data scientist's output.
How we work
Open tools. Governed data.
Open source means anyone can inspect and use our code. It does not mean anyone can use your data.
Your data stays yours.
Nothing is shared or published without the consent of the people it belongs to.
You set the terms.
Tools like PHYLO run under your governance: your access rules, your storage, your timeline. We build to the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance and OCAP® and will say plainly what that means in practice.
Sensitive places stay protected.
Locations of culturally significant species and sites are not published unless you decide they should be.
People decide, not the model.
The software surfaces what's in a sample. Stewards interpret it and decide what to do.
Work with us
Tribal nations & Indigenous programs
Bring your monitoring questions and your governance terms. We work alongside you.
community@molecular-intelligence.org →Land trusts & conservation organizations
Tell us what you're trying to understand about the places you protect.
community@molecular-intelligence.org →Scientists & research programs
Share methods, review our work, or help build a standard.
research@molecular-intelligence.org →Support the work
Foundations and donors help keep this open and available to programs that can't pay for it.
funders@molecular-intelligence.org →About
Founded in 2026 by Jean-Paul Cozzatti, a product and engineering leader and biophysicist, and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. He spends a lot of time on the water — and this work is the marriage of his biophysics education, his career in tech, and the rootedness that comes from noticing, from being fully present when immersed in nature. It's Two-Eyed Seeing, in the spirit of Mi'kmaq Elder Albert Marshall's teaching — Western science in service of the questions Indigenous communities are asking.