Opentrons raises $40M to let AI run the lab, not just plan the experiment

Avego led the Series E for the lab-robotics company, whose 11,000-plus robots already work in labs across more than 80 countries.

Opentrons Labworks has raised $40 million in Series E financing led by healthcare investor Avego, the company announced on October 29. BroadOak Capital Partners also participated. Existing investors include SoftBank Vision Fund, Khosla Ventures, Sands Capital, Lerer Hippeau and Y Combinator.

The Long Island City, New York company, founded in 2014, builds the Flex platform: benchtop robots and AI systems that let experiments be designed, run and improved in a continuous loop. Opentrons says more than 11,000 of its robots are deployed in laboratories in over 80 countries, including at every top-20 U.S. research university, 14 of the top 15 global biopharma companies and 90 percent of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies.

The Series E will fund the next phase of autonomous science: scaling the robotics, software and data infrastructure, investing in AI-driven experiment execution, and expanding into new markets and geographies. The bet is that AI can now design experiments far faster than laboratories can run them, and the lab bench itself has become the bottleneck.

"Millions of scientists spend much of their day on manual work a robot can do. Giving that time back to discovery is the biggest opportunity in science," said James Atwood, CEO of Opentrons. "We made lab automation accessible for any lab, and our systems are built for AI to run experiments directly." The marker to watch is whether AI-designed protocols convert reliably into repeatable physical runs at scale, which is the claim the whole autonomous-science pitch rests on.