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
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
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
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
formalized that it could sell as an actual product
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
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
