companies

Benchling

Cloud R&D platform for biotech labs to run electronic notebooks, sample registries and inventory, now adding AI agents on top of that structured data.

Benchling was founded in 2012 by Sajith Wickramasekara and Ashu Singhal, two MIT classmates who set out to replace the paper notebooks and spreadsheets that still ran most life-sciences labs with a single cloud system for recording, organizing and sharing experimental data. The San Francisco company has since raised more than $400 million, including a 2021 Series F at a $6 billion valuation, and counts over 1,300 biotech companies and 7,500 academic labs among its users, including Moderna, Sanofi and Merck. The core product, the Benchling R&D Cloud, bundles an electronic lab notebook, molecular biology tools, a sample and reagent registry, inventory management, workflow tracking and a data-analysis layer called Insights into one system, aimed at replacing the patchwork of point tools many biotechs cobble together as they scale from a handful of scientists to hundreds. More recently Benchling has layered AI agents on top of that structured data — including a natural-language query tool and a research agent that can answer cross-study questions — betting that the years of standardized lab data customers have accumulated in Benchling gives those AI features a cleaner foundation than tools built on messier, unstructured lab records.

Founded

2012

Headquarters

San Francisco, United States

Sector

applications