Concept
Data workflows in biology labs will become more streamlined as mainstream software is adopted and network affects kick in.
Longer Description
Lab data & automation platforms will become increasingly important as more scientists end up establishing and consolidating workflow and data processing norms along with their work, rather than one-off pieces of software. Generally the goal of these companies is to use software to move biology research into the design, test, and build format of development. The LIMS market alone is currently at 815M (source), and things like genomic sequencing have introduced exponentially more data into what labs have to handle on average.
Other thoughts on GTM/Founder Profiles etc
- It’s clear that many workflows in bioinformatics will become more streamlined over the next few years, but it’s not clear what this GTM will look like. There’s been much contention around the uniqueness of the academic lab, versus private lab, versus pharma lab specifically software purchasing process. We believe winning GTMs will pursue initial workflow automation that has measurable, bottom line financial outcome for a biology company - such as the ability to complete IND reports, BLA, or clinical trial filing much more quickly - and will use this to expand into adjacent data streams.
- Ultimately we believe new winners in this space will be successful by targeting teams and categories that know they already have a lot of data coming from various instruments digitally and need to process it (currently this seems to be sequencing), particularly between a number of people. If they have some digitized process of pulling this data off machines that’s helpful.
- The team likely has experience across both lab research, but also productizing software and data workflows more generally.
Comparable Companies
- Ganymaede - lab data device integration and automation platform, sync instrument data to ELN or LIMS
- Library of high level automation tools and bioinformatic functions
- Selling to Scientists, lab software engineers, manufacturing IOT, management
- LatchBio - open-sourced tools for serverless bioinformatics workflows in gene therapy, cell therapy, protein engineering, NGS - in python! Focused on helping researchers set up no-code interfaces for their teams.
- Benchling - system of record for scientific data, in-vivo experiment orchestration end to beginning. Cell therapy, gene therapy, RNA therapeutics.
- 600 customers in 2021
- Methods samples and inventory coordination across teams as well.
- Watershed - focused on accelerating multi-omics data analysis
- Exponential increase in NGS data means that provisioning compute is a large challenge
- Data lab with GUI/python overlap
- PipeBio - antibody sequencing analysis and engineering
- Cradle Bio - software infrastructure for molecular design (still very early)
- DNANexus, BaseSpace Sequence Hub, Galaxy, Basepair Genomics, Biobox Analytics, and many more in stealth
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