Benchling Raises $14.5M From Benchmark to Advance Life Sciences Research
June 14 2018 - 7:30AM
Business Wire
Announces 500% ARR Growth and more than 100,000
scientists using its platform
Today Benchling, the data management and collaboration platform
built to advance life sciences research, announced it has closed
$14.5M in Series B funding. The round was led by Benchmark, with
participation from F-Prime Capital, a global venture capital firm
associated with Fidelity Investments, and returning investor Thrive
Capital. Benchmark General Partner Eric Vishria will be joining the
board of directors.
The new funding comes as the company’s ARR skyrocketed 500% and
its customer base tripled year-over-year. Today, more than 100,000
scientists across enterprises and academia are using Benchling.
Since its last funding round in 2016, Benchling has seen leading
pharmaceutical and biotech customers, such as Regeneron
Pharmaceuticals, Incyte, Editas Medicine, Agenus, Zymergen, and
Obsidian Therapeutics, standardize on its R&D platform.
“Regeneron has been led by physician-scientists for our entire
30-year history,” said Nicholas Papadopoulos, Ph.D., Senior Vice
President, Research & Development Operations at Regeneron.
“Since our founding, science has remained our central guiding
principle. Benchling fits perfectly into this philosophy, providing
us a flexible informatics platform that enables our scientists to
focus on high-impact research and deliver life-transforming
medicines.”
Historically, biologics comprised a small percentage of
pharmaceutical pipelines. Today, biologics are widely acknowledged
to be the drugs of the future, making up 40% of the pipeline. The
importance of biologics will only increase as breakthroughs like
CRISPR impact not only pharmaceuticals but also industries like
agriculture and energy. Despite these advancements, scientists are
often stuck with archaic systems to track their work, including
paper notebooks, offline spreadsheets, and legacy on-premise
software, delaying critical decisions around research and
experiments. Seeing this problem firsthand, the Benchling team
created a purpose-built platform to give scientists the ability to
compile and organize comprehensive data on all of their R&D
programs. Due to Benchling’s platform, customers report up to a 4X
increase in productivity and up to a 67% reduction in emails to
collaborate on their research.
“We see scientists spending more than a third of their time on
unscientific busywork. This is a huge loss of scientific potential
and a drain on Ph.D. resources,” said Benchling co-founder and CEO
Sajith Wickramasekara. “We started Benchling to help scientists
make better decisions faster and use their time on higher-impact
work such as experimental strategy and design. Our hope is that
they can advance life sciences at a faster pace and do in 10 years
what otherwise may take 30 to 50.”
The company empowers R&D teams with a suite of unified
applications to encourage active collaboration, design and track
biologics research, and accelerate the production and retention of
knowledge.
“Within the next five years, the majority of top pharmaceuticals
will be biology-based drugs,” said Benchmark General Partner, Eric
Vishria. “Benchling is coming in at the optimal time to supercharge
the incredible work scientists are doing, and help the world make
breakthrough discoveries in a fraction of the time. Sajith and his
team have identified a critical need for better software in life
sciences, and their opportunity will only continue to grow as this
field takes off.”
With this new round of funding, Benchling plans to accelerate
product development and continue growing its team, which recently
added the talents of Kaiser Mulla-Feroze as Chief Marketing
Officer, who previously spent a decade at Salesforce before heading
up marketing at Totango; and Sam Partovi, formerly VP of Sales at
Medidata Solutions, where he played a key role in scaling the
business into the hundreds of millions in revenue. Additionally,
the company will focus on growing its customer base, which includes
enterprise companies and some of the world's most renowned research
labs at universities such as Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, and
Stanford.
About Benchling
Benchling is the leader in cloud-based informatics for life
science R&D. The company offers a unified R&D platform
purpose-built for biologics, including solutions for Lab Notebook,
Molecular Biology, Bioregistration, Sample Tracking, and Request
& Workflow Management. Benchling is used by over 100,000
scientists globally throughout multinational pharmaceutical
corporations, emerging biotechnology companies, and major research
institutions. For more information, please visit
http://www.benchling.com.
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BenchlingKaiser Mulla-Ferozekaiser@benchling.com