Opentrons Labworks raised $40M in a Series E round led by healthcare investor Avego with BroadOak Capital Partners, the company said Thursday.
The company started in 2014 and builds machines the size of a small cabinet, glass-fronted, with a motorized pipette inside that draws and dispenses tiny amounts of liquid from well to well. Its Flex system is the more capable model, with higher capacity and an optional gripper that moves plates so more of an experiment runs unattended. The smaller OT-2 handles routine pipetting at a lower price, for labs that do not need the throughput or the plate handling.
Both are programmable, and Opentrons also sells AI software that designs, runs and improves the experimental loop. Labs configure the machines for DNA extraction, PCR, protein purification and ELISAs, the antibody and antigen assays used to look for signs of infection.
The pitch is labor. Chief executive James Atwood says millions of scientists spend much of the day on manual work a robot can do, and that giving that time back to discovery is the biggest opportunity in the field. The company argues the physical lab has become the bottleneck now that models can propose more experiments than anyone can run.
The installed base is the argument for standardizing on it. Opentrons counts 11,000-plus robots now sitting in labs across more than 80 countries, and says nine of the ten largest drugmakers by its accounting use them. Lab automation has been expensive and custom for most of its history, and this round is meant to scale the hardware, the software and the data layer underneath.
