INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Email and a smarter notebook might be enough for handling communication for projects or experiments inside a team in a lab in some
But when you have around 200 scientists working on discovering something new — say, a new drug — that communication process is going to
quickly break down, and Sajith Wickramasekara that sits somewhere between science and software.That’s the goal for Benchling, which
Wickramasekara hopes will make life easier for researchers and help simplify and speed up the process of scientific discovery
Specializing in life sciences, Benchling aims to create a comprehensive suite of tools that help researchers thoroughly log their processes
and collaborate among other scientists
Benchling looks to provide a rigorous platform that can take a lot of the work away from researchers, who instead might be documenting
everything in email, Excel sheets, or just in a notebook somewhere
Benchling said it has raised a $14.5 million round of financing led by Benchmark Capital, with participation from F-Prime Capital and Thrive
Benchmark’s Eric Vishria is joining the company’s board of directors.“I was always planning to go to grad school to become a
scientist,” Wickramasekara said
“Obviously since I’m working here I took a kind of left turn
As someone who was doing both science and software, on the software side of things I felt like i had really great tools for working with
other people, and on the science side I felt like there were really great scientific tools but not great tools for working with other
people.”At its core, Benchling is a suite of applications and tools that include ways to design experiments as well as document them
Researchers can track materials they are producing, manage their physical inventory — like even tubes or containers — and helps
scientists standardize and easily query information from existing or previous runs
The service seeks to capture all of this in some unified platform that a company can deploy across a whole fleet of researchers and
teams. Wickramasekara says more than 100,000 scientists are using the platform.Benchling was initially born as a sort of smart notebook for
While that’s where it got started — and where a lot of the learning happened — eventually the team ended up creating something a
little more formalized that it could sell as an actual product
That step proved a little more challenging as academics tend to be either alone or in small teams, so they don’t necessarily need the
robust tools that a product like Benchling might have when commercialized.“The freeform nature of a lab notebook is actually sufficient
[for academia],” Wickramasekara said
“In the industry, that’s where all the structure comes in
We have a team as part of our customer success and implementation, we help customers come up with the right model and complexity and adjust
At the end fo the day, all these customers do something slightly differently
But we work with probably more than 80 customers and 25 do antibody research, so we figure out all the best practices over time
We help customers think about the tradeoffs vs one data model for another.”Benchling also offers those same employees a suite of auditing
tools, which Wickramasekara would be critical as it looked to move into larger companies that are dealing with more sensitive IP
For a company looking to discover new drugs, keeping that process under tight control is especially important — especially when they are
working with organizations like the FDA
Benchling admins get a comprehensive view of who is doing what within the system, as well as guidelines around documentation.Part of the
challenge will be catering to all the niches and needs these individual companies might have throughout their own unique experimentation
Each lab is different, with its own quirks, and Benchling aims to be a unified platform that covers as many scenarios as possible, even with
help tuning and adjustable models
So that means that there is room for other tools that could tap other niches and becomes the one-size-fits-all
But over time and with enough data, a tool like Benchling could figure out not only the best practices for specific labs, but also ones they
should use — and then cover all those bases.
