We’re thrilled to welcome Artificial—a software company building a first-of-its-kind lab automation platform—to the M12 portfolio as lead of their Series A round.
Biology research labs have yet to have their Industrial and Digital Revolutions. When I started my academic research career at the National Institutes of Health 21 years ago and my biopharmaceutical career at Novartis 15 years ago, biology labs were light- to semi-automated. Unfortunately, this is still very much true today for most labs, which operate more like test kitchens rather than factories.
A lack of automation in labs has in part led to the Reproducibility Crisis over the last decade—Biopharma preclinical teams waste tens of billions of R&D dollars each year in failed attempts to reproduce and translate major academic research into breakthrough therapies. The rise of Synthetic Biology (synbio) proved that fully-automated workflows can help solve the reproducibility issue and accelerate the pace of scientific discoveries, but exclusively at a high cost. Only a small number of synbio companies have raised enough capital to build expensive, customized, industrialized automation systems. Advancing lab automation at scale is critical to decrease the time and cost to achieving breakthrough scientific discoveries. Artificial’s aLab suite is the operating system that will advance automation in labs across the Life Sciences industry.
Artificial’s aLab Suite is a first-of-its-kind, human-in-the-loop lab automation platform that orchestrates everything in a lab including other software, instruments, robots, and people. With the help of aLab Suite, scientists can build a digital twin of the lab, schedule manual and automated tasks, and design automated workflows based on their manual experiments. While some incumbent solutions are code-intensive and accessible only to interdisciplinary bioengineers, Artificial has committed to human-centered design with a low/no code and intuitive user experience.
