London-based Automata providing robotic automation solutions to the life sciences industry has raised $40 million. The investment round was led by Dimension alongside participation from A.P. Moller Holding, parent company of the A.P. Moller Group and owners of, amongst other businesses, laboratory testing group Unilabs. Returning investors Octopus Ventures (which backed Flock and Kita), Hummingbird, Isomer Capital, Possible Ventures and Aldea Ventures also participated in the round.
Global expansion and growth plans
Automata will use the funds to accelerate its rapid growth and industry presence across the US, UK and EMEA. In addition to the geographic expansion, the company plans to grow its team. It will also focus the business on the fast-growing opportunities in the global life sciences sector and develop its brand recognition and presence in the industry.
Mostafa Elsayed, Founder and CEO of Automata, commented: “Achieving a fundraise with exciting and experienced investors in a pretty challenging funding environment is a real endorsement of the potential and capabilities of our lab automation platform and the work the team has achieved. The raise enables us to continue to focus on our existing and upcoming deployments as well as continuing to develop products that transform how scientists interact with their labs. Most importantly, it will help us to accelerate the impact our users are already having on people’s lives around the world.”
Nan Li, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Dimension, added: “The modern lab is a data factory, requiring precise coordination across a suite of lab instruments juggling multiple protocol runs. As a result, the industry needs a lab automation system that is built with an emphasis on speed, reliability, reconfigurability, reproducibility, and scale. Automata’s modular software and hardware LINQ system delivers just that and we’re thrilled to partner with them to build a category-defining business in this space.”
Chetan Mehta, Head of Growth Equity of A.P. Moller Holding, added: “We are delighted to partner with Automata, an emerging leader in modernizing and automating the global life science industry. Automata’s solutions help increase throughput, lower cost, and accelerate innovation allowing its customers to focus on pushing further into cutting edge medical and life science research.”
Life science lab automation platform
Founded by Mostafa ElSayed and Suryansh Chandra in 2015 in London, Automata helping life sciences rapidly innovate, diagnose and discover at scale. It provides robotic automation for labs in the life science space that want to scale up and get results quicker.
Its product portfolio includes human collaborative and arm-based lab automation robots. It can be used to process samples and is applicable for drug screening, colony counting, and acid testing. It also offers cloud-enabled robot management software schedules and orchestrates the protocols from a single platform.
Automata’s LINQ automation platform is designed to make automation easily adoptable by science labs across research institutions, hospital groups and pharmaceutical and biotech companies and CROs, whether they are running high throughput workflows or experimenting with a high rate of workflow changeover requiring dynamic protocol development.
Current customers of Automata include NHS Trusts such as The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, academic institutions including The Francis Crick Institute, testing labs such as HSL, CDMOs and CROs, pharma and biotech companies, such as Astra Zeneca and bit.bio.
