About Benchling
Benchling was founded in 2012 by Sajith Wickramasekara and Ashu Singhal, Stanford classmates who identified that biology researchers, in academic labs and, increasingly, well-funded biotech companies, were managing enormously complex, high-value experimental data using tools poorly suited to the task, such as paper lab notebooks, spreadsheets, and disconnected point software, making it difficult to track experiments, collaborate across a growing research team, and maintain compliant records for eventual regulatory submissions. Benchling's cloud-based platform provides an electronic lab notebook that lets researchers record and organize experimental protocols and results, molecular biology tools for designing and tracking DNA and protein sequences, and broader laboratory information management system (LIMS) capabilities for tracking physical samples, inventory, and workflows across a lab or company.
The company's platform has become particularly important infrastructure for the growing number of well-funded biotech companies working in areas like gene editing, synthetic biology, and cell and gene therapy, where research processes are especially data-intensive and where maintaining rigorous, auditable records is important both for scientific reproducibility and for eventual regulatory submissions to agencies like the FDA. Benchling has positioned its platform as purpose-built specifically for life sciences research and development workflows, differentiating from more generic laboratory software or repurposed general-purpose data tools, and has expanded its offerings to cover broader R&D data management, biologics discovery workflows, and increasingly AI-assisted research tools tailored to biological data types. The company counts many prominent biotech and pharmaceutical companies among its customers. Benchling has raised very substantial venture funding from investors including Benchmark, Thrive Capital, and Altimeter Capital, reaching a valuation of several billion dollars as biotech R&D has become an increasingly software- and data-intensive discipline.
