Benchling - The "Google Docs" for R&D Teams
Benchling is building platform for R&D teams and scientist to make their research process much more organised, currently valued at $6Bn, lets dive deep into the story behind their growth.
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Benchling is the “Google Docs for R&D” and serves over 200,000 researchers across 700 companies, the company’s value proposition is to help life science researchers better organize their lab work.
The company was started by Sajith Wickramasekara and Anshu Singhal, two MIT graduates in 2012, it was a part of Y Combinator Summer 2012 Batch.
Benchling is valued at $6Bn and has raised $412Mn in total funding from investors like Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, and Altimeter Capital.
Sajith Wickramasekara spent a lot of time working in high school and then at MIT working in research labs. He found it amusing and ironic that even at MIT, the most innovative and cutting-edge research labs heavily relied on pen and stack and stacks of paperwork.
Sajith Wickramasekara on his quest to find a solution started building Benchling “Google Docs for R&D” with Anshu Singhal his MIT collegemate.
Benchling when launched wasn’t an immediate hit among the VCs, most people didn’t understand the biotech industry, which pushed the founders to stay heads down and focus on engineering and product. Ultimately, Paul Graham and the Y Combinator realized the potential of the product and took a bet on the team and the company.
Benchling - The Innovative Product for Innovation Hubs
Benchling built digital tools to replace paperwork and Excel sheets to streamline lab work research and development processes. The platform focuses on academic research as well as enterprise research and development labs.
The company’s tools are used by industries such as Biopharmaceuticals, Industrial Biotech, and Agritech. Benchling has become the go-to tool in the Scientific community dealing with Antibodies and Proteins, Cell Therapy, Gene Therapy, Microbial Strains, and RNA Therapeutics.
Benchling’s biggest hurdle was to build a simple enough product for early users, a product they could pick naturally without any special training and workshops.
In the early days, Benchling focused on academic labs and improving processes around tracking and sharing experimental design tasks. In academia more broadly, you’re operating in intense data silos (many of them stored in hand-written documents and different people’s heads).
Currently, Benchling offers three main products - Benchling Bioresearch, Benchling Bioprocess, and Benchling In Vivo, let’s dive deep into the capabilities of these products.
Benchling Bioresearch
It is a digital workspace for biotech researchers, a platform through which scientists can plan, capture, and share their research with their teams and collaborators.
Benchling Bioresearch gives teams a shared space to design and manage experiments, complex biomolecules, workflows, and results end-to-end. With operational insights, organizations can track work efficiently. The workspace is easy to pick up and its user-friendly interface makes life easier for scientists and saves them a lot of time.
Benchling Bioresearch is now a go-to solution in the Bioresearch industry. Some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Gilead use and promote it.
Benchling In Vivo
An in vivo studies are experiments done on living subjects like animals, plants, and whole cells. These studies take a long time and need to be done in a different environment with a lot of variable changes. Taking note of these experiments, and their results in a paper and Excel means a lot of head-scratching during the month and year-long processes.
With Benchling In Vivo, companies can manage in vivo studies with modern software designed for data capture, collaboration, and insights. This flexible platform allows teams to save time and generate accurate in vivo study data as part of the connected R&D.
Benchling In Vivo establishes repeatable study designs with an intuitive user interface, so researchers can initiate studies more efficiently, it also provides additional features to make the process simple like eliminating bias in animal selection via randomization, and features to drive reproducible in vivo studies.
Benchling Bioprocess
Data collection, organization, and collaboration during the research process are one part. The second most important part of the R&D process, especially in biotech is building research and development processes.
Benchling is building tools to help enterprises and research labs plan and execute large experiments by using Benchling Bioprocess. The platform will be released in early 2024, it is still being tested by the Benchling team and some initial set of customers. The platform can be used for recipe design, experiment planning, batch execution, and analysis.
Business Model and Secondary Markets
When Benchling was launched there wasn’t much interest in biotech, and life sciences among the Venture community. But since then, investors have realized the opportunity in the space resulting in a lot of interest in Benchling and other companies in the sectors.
Benchling raised $100Mn in Series F funding in late 2021, after rasing $200Mn in Series E earlier in the same year. Safe to say, the company has enough pull to raise large rounds from the top-tier VCs that it didn’t feel much need to sell their stocks through secondary sales. But some of the employees have sold their shares and cashed out so we have a price point of Benchling’s secondary market stock.
The company is valued at a staggering $6Bn, a point after which the IPO route makes much more sense than just raising more money for growth. According to contrary research, the company was growing 100% y-o-y and crossed $100Mn+ in ARR with a 169% Net Retention. The company follows the SaaS approach to market its platform and offers a freemium to its customers.
The company was gearing up for an IPO in mid-2022 but due to the worsening conditions of the market, decided to put a hold on its plans for a little longer.
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