What You Should Know:
– Today, life sciences R&D cloud platform Benchling announced a $50M Series D raise led by Alkeon and joined by new investors Spark Capital, Lux Capital and ICONIQ Partners, as well as existing investors Thrive Capital and Benchmark.
– This funding will help Benchling expand its product suite, providing vital collaboration tools for life science researchers to help embrace the complexity of biology and find breakthroughs faster.
Benchling, the leading life sciences R&D cloud platform, announced it closed $50 million in Series D funding led by Alkeon and joined by new investors Spark Capital, Lux Capital, and ICONIQ Partners, as well as existing investors Thrive Capital and Benchmark. The round comes at one of the most pivotal moments for the biotechnology industry as companies race to deliver diagnostics, therapeutics, and vaccines for COVID-19, while advances such as CRISPR and lab robotics continue to fuel breakthroughs in medicine, food, and agriculture, energy and materials. Benchling will use the investment to build advanced product capabilities, expand its international presence, and drive adoption across leading R&D organizations, bringing the power of modern-day software to drive the rapid transformation of the life sciences industry.
Replacing Outdated Pen and Paper Processes
Life science R&D has become incredibly complex — from the molecules to the processes to the multi-dimensional data. Until Benchling, there had been no end-to-end, purpose-built SaaS application to enhance, streamline, and drive collaboration across R&D teams.
Founded in 2012, Benchling is helping the next generation of scientists make breakthrough discoveries faster than ever before. Replacing outdated pen and paper processes, Benchling offers unified R&D solutions purpose-built for biotech, including Notebook, Molecular Biology, Registry, Inventory, and Request & Workflow Management.
Recent Traction/Milestones
Since launching in 2012, more than 230,000 scientists and 1,000 R&D organizations have adopted Benchling’s cloud platform to centralize massively complex experimental datasets and optimize R&D processes. Benchling doubled its customer base over the past year across industries ranging from pharmaceuticals and fuels to agriculture and food. Scientists report that the solution doubles R&D productivity, with customers at the forefront of COVID-19 research, such as Gilead Sciences, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals and Mammoth Biosciences, seeing usage soar 54% since the start of the pandemic.
So far this year, Benchling has launched several product enhancements, including Benchling for Lab Automation to help companies maximize lab automation investments, and Benchling Insights, which gives life scientists the ability to query, visualize and collaborate around complex biological data.
“Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, biotechnology is in the global spotlight like never before. We are proud that so many of our customers are relying on Benchling to develop diagnostics, treatments and vaccines with speed and precision,” said Saji Wickramasekara, CEO and founder of Benchling. “Rapidly solving COVID-19 is just the start of what will solidify this as the century of biotech. This funding enables us to bring that same speed to life science as a whole, no matter the research area – oncology, food and agriculture, energy, or materials. In particular, with our upcoming products to support chemistry-based R&D and chemically-modified biomolecules, Benchling will soon become a singular solution for all of life science.”
