Benchling Raises $7M in Funding
The News
We recently raised $7M in a round of funding led by Thrive Capital. Andreessen Horowitz, who led our previous financing, also participated. We're thrilled to welcome new angel investors, including life sciences veteran Errik Anderson and tech investor/actor Ashton Kutcher. Benchling is first and foremost a technology organization, and we're fortunate enough to have some of the best technology investors in our corner. Collectively, they have helped build some of the most successful companies in the world, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Skype.
I want to talk about what this means for you, our customer, in terms of where we've gone so far and where we plan to go.
Cutting-Edge Science, Outdated Tools
Biotechnology has the potential to solve humanity’s most pressing challenges, such as disease, renewable energy, clean water, and hunger. It touches everyone in one way or another.
There have been incredible breakthroughs in the life sciences over the past decade. It now costs one thousand dollars to sequence a human genome. Precision gene editing is now fast, cheap, and easy with the advent of CRISPR. We can literally re-engineer cells in a patient's blood to seek and destroy cancer.
Despite these advances, life science is still painfully slow and expensive. We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on R&D every year for consistently diminishing output. The brightest scientific minds are hard at work, but we've given them archaic tools and expect them to tackle the most complex problems the field has ever seen and grapple with more data than has ever been generated.
It's time to reimagine the operations of research. The most cutting-edge biotechs have realized this: technology is a competitive advantage, not a compliance burden to be forced upon scientists. It's the only way to keep up with the exponential scientific progress we are making. Paper, Excel, and email just don't cut it.
Where We Come In
Since Benchling’s founding in 2012 to address the inefficiencies we encountered in our own research, the platform has grown to be used by over 40,000 scientists worldwide. What was once a group of colleagues working on a small project together at MIT has grown into a company of nearly 50 people, all of whom believe in the vision of a world where the digital tools of research are as powerful as the tools for working at the bench.
We raised additional funding so that we could aggressively invest in our product and scale our scientific operations. That means launching new modules on the platform and bringing Benchling to ten times more scientists than we reach today.
We're extremely proud of all that we’ve done so far to make scientists’ lives easier – from our industry-leading CRISPR tool, to the more recent release of our Bioregistry. Benchling is already being used in organizations ranging from academic labs to global pharmaceutical organizations. We're going to keep pushing the envelope until we are the platform that can power R&D operations from start to finish, even in the largest organizations with the most complex, cutting-edge workflows. And that's just step one. There's so much more to do.
As always, the Benchling team has been hard at work. In the coming months, you can look forward to an entirely new column of our product offering, and we’ve begun work on how Benchling could empower scientists’ work beyond the bench.
Thanks for your continued support!