Benchling

Benchling was founded in 2012 by MIT students Sajith Wickramasekara, its chief executive, Ashu Singhal, its president, and Cory Li, who went through Y Combinator's summer 2012 batch. It is headquartered in San Francisco, with an East Coast office in Boston, an EMEA headquarters in Zurich and a Belfast office added through its 2022 acquisition of Overwatch Research. Its cloud platform combines an electronic lab notebook, LIMS, molecular biology, biologics, bioprocess and in vivo tools with Benchling AI, which puts agents and models inside scientific workflows on structured R&D data. Benchling charges companies in biopharma, agriculture, industrial biotech and materials for the platform, and much of its software is free for academic use. More than 1,300 companies use it. Benchling raised a $200 million Series E in 2021 and a $100 million Series F on Nov. 18, 2021, co-led by Franklin Templeton and Altimeter Capital, at a $6.1 billion valuation.