- Benchling, which makes cloud R&D software for life sciences companies, emerged during the pandemic.
- It just hit 1000 customers and hired new executives from companies like Atlassian, Workday, and Zendesk.
- These new leaders are essential in the next steps to transform its software into a platform, its CEO said.
Life science-focused cloud startup Benchling has seen its business pick up over the past few years due to the pandemic, and a renewed interest in biotech among investors.
Today, just as it reached a milestone of 1,000 customers — including big names like Sanofi, Genentech, and Syngenta — it also announced several new executives to its leadership team, including a new chief technology officer poached from at Atlassian.
Stephen Deasy, former VP of engineering at Atlassian, is now Benchling’s first CTO. He joins a lineup of other new executive hires in recent months, including Shawna Wolverton, a Zendesk and Salesforce alum, who joined as chief product officer a few months ago. Rick Wright, most recently a customer outcomes executive at ServiceNow, also joins to lead customer experience, and Niall Wall, a senior VP of partners and business development at Workday, joins to lead global partnerships.
The Benchling grew in size and value
Benchling develops cloud software to help life science companies make their research and development more efficient. It offers a suite of apps that help scientists design their experiments, document them, track the results, and ultimately capture and analyze the resulting data.
The company raised $417.8 million in total funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and Sequoia Capital, and saw its valuation increase from $900 million to $6.1 billion between May 2020 and October 2021, according to PitchBook. It has raised three rounds of funding since 2020. It has also been named one to watch by several VCs, including its entry into Bessemer and Forbes’ annual list of the top 100 cloud startups.
Investor interest has coincided with a period of growth for the company, including going from 400 customers in January 2021 to 1000 in August. Now the company is looking to its next phase of growth, which hinges on the strategy of building a platform around its software.
The next challenge
These new leaders are critical to helping Benchling meet that challenge, CEO and cofounder Sajith Wickramasekara told Insider.
“As we look at the product problem in front of us and what kind of leader we need, that requires more platform thinking,” Wickramasekara said. “We have to serve this global customer base that ranges from small to large.”
He sees a huge opportunity to bring life science companies to the cloud, especially since there aren’t many other software companies serving that particular market.
“Coming from the software world, I’m pretty — I’d say I’m blown away by the quality of tools that scientists can use to actually collaborate and do their jobs,” Wickramasekara said.
Beyond its private sector clients, Benchling has also been used by government agencies, university research groups, and commercial labs to scale up their COVID-19 research and testing.
Although biotech and pharmaceutical companies are the most obvious customers for Benchling, the software is also used by industries such as agriculture to design higher-yielding crops and food science companies such as producers of meat alternatives. It is even used by a company called Bolt Threads that makes leather from mushrooms.
Bringing in new leaders to help grow
Wickramasekara said that because of the large market for Benchling’s technology, they now want to expand their software to help with product development as well as research. The company’s new CTO and product chief will be key to making this happen.
Stephen Deasy, Chief Technology Officer at Benchling
Benchling
Deasy led product engineering for Atlassian products such as Jira, Confluence, and Trello during Atlassian’s own transition to the cloud, and helped scale the engineering organization throughout. That’s how he’ll focus on his new role at Benchling, he told Insider.
“We’re interested in delivering value and scaling the customer, and that’s really what I’m going to focus on first,” Deasy said.
Shawna Wolverton, chief product officer at Benchling
Benchling
Meanwhile, Wolverton has experience helping build the Salesforce platform, which in turn fostered an ecosystem around the cloud giant’s products. At Benchling, he is committed to much the same goal.
“With so many developments coming, we can do a lot as a common platform across all these different processes from agriculture to therapeutics,” he said. “We want to make sure that Benchling is a place where we can integrate all kinds of different applications and build an application platform and an ecosystem.”
Got a tip? Contact this reporter by email at [email protected] or Signal at 925-364-4258. (Pre-pitch by email only, please.)