Automata expands its lab automation ambitions with $50 million in funding
Laboratories around the world are being forced to run more tests and process more samples, not only because of COVID-19 but also because of the growing biotech and drug development sector, and automation is the way forward.
Automata, which started out by building a robotic arm for individual tasks, has now raised $50 million to automate all laboratory processes from start to finish. In 2019 the company raised $7.4 million in funding and focused on developing and deploying its Eva robotic arm, which could be used for many routine tasks: moving glassware and performing simple samples.
The robotic arm has six degrees of freedom and is designed to perform precise and reproducible actions. Its payload is less than 1.25 kg. But Automata soon found that being a robot supplier for small, highly customized projects and labs was not a viable business model.
“It is not enough to engage with your customer at a single stage, such as "here is the most affordable robotic arm on the market, good luck!" If companies buy one or two robots, this optimizes a few processes but does not revolutionize how the firm works. So over the past few years we have started looking for ways to drive adoption of our technology on an important scale”
Automata identified three large markets on the verge of an automation boom: diagnostics, drug discovery, and synthetic biology (that is, discovering and growing purpose-built microbes).
When the company installed its first few hundred Eva arms, it found that firms in these sectors had a lot of "partial automation." El-Sayed compared this to having a dishwasher in the kitchen: you no longer have to wash dishes by hand, but you still have to load and unload it, add soap, and choose settings. It is useful, but still entirely dependent on human labor.
The limits of partial automation became apparent during the pandemic, when labs, especially those running PCR tests, operated at full capacity and still could not meet demand. Similarly, in drug development and synthetic biology, timelines for certain processes stretch to 5-7 years because there is a hard limit on how often a given process can be run.
Moving from partial to full automation can deliver huge time savings and productivity gains. But this could not be achieved with a few robotic arms. In late 2021 the company announced its new Automata Labs hardware platform, a kind of modular enclosure designed for continuous operation of equipment inside and the ability to pass results to the next stage.
“We had to build an entirely new hardware stack that makes this kind of automation possible. The benchtop is actually the standard unit of every lab, so in essence it is a whole lab bench that can be automated”
The company's most notable success is an NHS testing center that has been automated to the maximum (that is, people still work there, but a huge share of the work is done by robots) and has so far processed more than a million samples.
El-Sayed said the number is large, but more important was that automation halved the time needed to process results, which is critical for urgent tests. Much of this is because the level of automation lets clinicians set robots to run overnight, so results are ready in the morning.
In experimental conditions, timelines can be cut by 25-40%, which is significant but may seem modest to those who have read about productivity gains of orders of magnitude in sectors such as manufacturing. El-Sayed noted that there are other ways to further improve this specific figure. But for many researchers there is also a serious need for accuracy and reproducibility.
“There was a clear, describable need among these user bases. There is a core challenge of increasing throughput while reducing routine tasks in the lab, but there was also a repeatability problem in labs that we did not know about. Teams published their own research, then tried to reproduce the results and failed, because lab processes were very manual and variable”
So much of the appeal of automation lies in systematic tracking and performance, as well as fewer errors. To this end, Automata is investing in software to manage and administer its lab equipment and robots.
“Scientists at these organizations, especially their automation specialists taking on this promising role, really want the ability to program these systems and build these screens themselves rather than call us. Anyone who has negotiated with scientists probably knows that many of them would prefer to keep operating the old way rather than cede control to a third-party organization. So the main focus was on building a system designed to be deployed and configured by the team on site. More and more labs using our equipment are coming to us for these digital solutions to configure or deploy them, or to connect the ecosystem to their data system”
A new generation of hardware, currently in limited testing with partners, is due to be launched later in 2022, and Automata is also preparing to enter the US market and expand in European markets.
The huge amount of hiring, manufacturing, sales, support and so on needed for this expansion is the reason the company raised $50 million. The funding round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Hummingbird, Latitude Ventures, ABB Technology Ventures, Isomer Capital, and In-Q-Tel.
“Automata Labs accelerates human ingenuity by enabling labs and scientists to achieve consistent results faster at greater scale and, ultimately, to raise their ambitions. We are glad to have led this funding round, as Automata represents exactly the type of highly innovative company we invest in and support. We look forward to Automata's next steps in both life sciences and beyond”
Automata was founded in 2015 by Mostafa El-Sayed and Suryansh Chandra, two researchers from Zaha Hadid's lab. The company's goal is to open new opportunities for innovation through automation.
“For too long, scientists and clinicians have had to work with overly complex lab solutions, resulting in equipment and software that were fragmented and difficult to coordinate. Solutions are also often too rigid and unsuitable for labs with a small geographic reach. Our next-generation technology solves this problem”
