Company raises $5M from Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital to scale up commercial operations.

Benchling, Inc., a leading-developer of cloud based tools for life science, today announced the launch of its new platform which accelerates R&D by tracking experiment details, facilitating collaboration, and streamlining data analysis. The company also announced that it closed $5 million in new financing led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Thrive Capital.

As biotech R&D becomes increasingly distributed across organizations and locations, it is more important than ever for scientists to have access to best-in-class tools that make collaboration effortless. The Benchling Research Platform fulfills this need. It houses all of the data that scientists work with — from DNA sequences to images and more — ensuring that all experimental data and context are fully versioned, indexed, and searchable.

"We spend billions of dollars on biomedical research annually - it's literally a matter of life and death,” said Balaji Srinivasan, Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Yet we don't spend anywhere near as much effort on making the results of that research reproducible, searchable, and machine-readable. Benchling provides a suite of tools for life science - centered around a digital laboratory notebook - that changes all that. Built by a team of MIT engineers, their technology has already been adopted by thousands of scientists across both industry and academia, and has a serious chance at becoming to biomedicine what GitHub has become to software engineering."

The Benchling Research Platform features: apps for core functions, such as designing DNA, creating interactive protocols, and annotating gel images; a live activity stream of research across an organization or lab; full-search over experimental data and context; and the ability to document, track, and witness experiments as they progress.

“Our scientists love Benchling,” said Jed Dean, VP of Operations and Engineering at Zymergen. “It is beautifully designed and unifies the functionality of several poorly performing tools in an integrated software suite. Benchling is proving to be an invaluable resource in sharing data across our rapidly growing organization.”

“Research today means disparate tools, manual data entry, and lots of paper,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, Chief Executive Officer of Benchling. “We aim to deliver a streamlined lab infrastructure that helps scientists keep up with increasingly complex assays, protocols, and data analysis. The Benchling Research Platform is a key step toward our vision of building the complete system of record for life science research.”

Proceeds from the financing will be used to accelerate the company’s commercial operations and expand Benchling’s software engineering and global customer support teams. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive Capital, Benchling’s investors include Y Combinator, Rock Health, FF Angel, SV Angel, Tim Draper, Geoff Ralston, Kevin Mahaffey, and Matt Huang.

About Benchling

Benchling is a venture-backed company based in San Francisco that aims to increase the rate of scientific output with its cloud-based platform that allows researchers to design and run experiments, analyze data, and share results. Benchling believes an R&D organization should have all institutional knowledge at its fingertips, and that making collaboration seamless will allow science to move faster. The Benchling Research Platform is used by scientists at more than 1,000 institutions around the world. Benchling was launched in 2013 by a team of software engineers with experience in molecular and computational biology whose mission is to help scientists work together.

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