Automata expands its lab automation ambitions with $50M B spherical – TechCrunch

The world’s labs are underneath strain to do extra checks and course of extra supplies, not simply resulting from COVID however from the rising biotech and drug growth sectors — and automation is the positive path forwards. Automata, which received its begin making a robotic arm for dealing with particular person duties, has now raised $50M to automate total lab processes from begin to end.

When we final talked with Automata in 2019, the corporate had simply raised a $7.4M A spherical and was specializing in creating and deploying its Eva robotic arm, which may very well be used for a wide range of frequent duties: transferring glass round, performing easy samples, that form of factor. But they quickly discovered that life as a robotic supplier for small, extremely particular person tasks and labs wasn’t a viable enterprise mannequin.

“It’s not enough to engage with your customer at one stage — like, ‘here’s the most affordable robot arm on the market, good luck!’ If companies buy one or two robots, it optimizes a few processes but it doesn’t revolutionize how that company works. So over the last few years we’ve started looking at how we can drive adoption of our tech at a scale that matters,” mentioned co-founder and CEO Mostafa ElSayed.

They recognized three massive markets that they felt had been on the cusp of an automation increase: diagnostics, drug discovery, and artificial biology (i.e. the invention and cultivation of purpose-built microbes).

What the corporate discovered because it put in the primary few hundred of its Eva arms was that corporations in these sectors had plenty of “partial automation.” ElSayed in contrast this to having a dishwasher in your kitchen: you don’t have to clean plates by hand any extra, however you continue to must load and unload it, add cleaning soap, choose the settings, and so on. Useful nevertheless it nonetheless depends totally on human labor.

The limits of partial automation had been highlighted through the pandemic, when labs performing PCR checks particularly had been working at most capability and nonetheless nowhere close to assembly demand. Similarly in drug growth and artificial bio, timelines stretch into the 5-7 yr vary for sure processes as a result of there’s a tough restrict on how steadily a given course of may be run. By transferring from a fan of full automation, large time financial savings and throughput will increase may be realized. But it couldn’t be carried out with a handful of robotic arms.

“We’ve had to build an entirely new hardware stack that allows for this kind of automation,” ElSayed mentioned. Late final yr they introduced their new {hardware} platform, Automata Labs, a form of modular container constructed for steady operation of equipment inside and the power to go the outcomes to the following step. “The benchtop is really the standard unit of all laboratories, so it’s basically a whole lab bench that’s amenable to automation.”

The firm’s most seen success is an NHS testing facility that has been as automated as is at the moment doable (that’s, people are nonetheless in there however an enormous quantity of the work is finished robotically), and has now processed over 1,000,000 samples. ElSayed identified that the quantity is massive, however the extra necessary one was that the automation decreased turnaround occasions for outcomes by half, which as you may think is essential for time-sensitive checks. It’s largely as a result of the automation stage lets the clinicians set the robots to work in a single day, and so they can have outcomes prepared within the morning.

In experimental settings, timelines may be decreased by 25-40 p.c, which is important however could sound modest to anybody who has learn of orders of magnitude productiveness will increase in sectors like manufacturing. ElSayed mentioned there are different paths to go all the way down to additional enhance that particular quantity, just like the “lights out laboratories” that enabled the NHS fast labs.

CEO Mostafa ElSayed.

But he famous that for a lot of researchers there’s additionally a critical want for accuracy and repeatability.

“There was a clear, describable need for those user bases,” he mentioned. “There’s the basic one of increasing throughput while reducing menial tasks in a lab… but there was also, and we didn’t know this going in, a repeatability problem in labs. Teams would publish their own research papers, then try to replicate the results and fail, because the processes in the lab were highly manual and variable.”

So a big a part of the attract automation is systematic monitoring and efficiency, and fewer errors. To that finish Automata has been investing within the software program to handle and administer its labware and robots.

“The scientists in these organizations — especially their automation scientists, this up and coming role — what they really want is the ability to program these systems themselves, and design these screenings themselves, rather than call us in,” mentioned ElSayed. As anybody who’s negotiated with scientists earlier than most likely is aware of, many would reasonably preserve doing issues the outdated approach reasonably than cede management to an out of doors company. So constructing a system that’s designed to be deployed and adjusted by the on-site crew has been a serious focus.

“More and more of the labs adopting our hardware are coming to us for these digital solutions to configure or deploy them, or connect the ecosystem to their data system,” he continued.

A brand new era of {hardware}, in restricted testing with companions, is about to be revealed later this yr, and Automata can also be on the brink of make the leap into the U.S. and wider European markets. The large quantity of hiring, manufacturing, gross sales, help and so forth that this growth necessitates are the explanation the corporate has raised this $50M B spherical. The spherical was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Hummingbird, Latitude Ventures, ABB Technology Ventures, Isomer Capital, In-Q-Tel and others.