European expansion and USD 100 million Series F financing

Biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny Bench­ling announces fur­ther expan­sion in Europe fol­low­ing a strong year of growth. The com­pa­ny achieved triple-dig­it year-over-year rev­enue growth in this mar­ket in its most recent fis­cal quar­ter. The num­ber of cus­tomers in Europe increased 184 per­cent year-over-year.

Con­cur­rent with the expan­sion, the com­pa­ny also announced that it has received $100 mil­lion in Series F financ­ing at a val­u­a­tion of $6.1 bil­lion. The fund­ing round was led by new investor Franklin Tem­ple­ton and exist­ing investor Altime­ter Cap­i­tal, and sup­port­ed by new investors Tiger Glob­al and Lone Pine Cap­i­tal, as well as exist­ing investors. Bench­ling will use the fund­ing to con­tin­ue its expan­sion in Europe and fur­ther devel­op its cloud-based R&D platform.

Growth will be fueled by the rapid rise of biotech­nol­o­gy, one of the fastest grow­ing indus­tries in the world. Mod­ern R&D is key to unlock­ing the poten­tial of biotech­nol­o­gy, which is rad­i­cal­ly trans­form­ing our world. Sci­en­tists are rely­ing on it to research, devel­op and ulti­mate­ly bring to mar­ket new med­i­cines and bio­log­i­cal­ly derived prod­ucts faster than ever before. The com­pa­ny is help­ing to accel­er­ate these breakthroughs.

This con­tin­ued expan­sion in Europe is a strate­gic move for the com­pa­ny to meet the grow­ing demand for inno­v­a­tive research and devel­op­ment from its more than 95 cus­tomers in the region. These cus­tomers include Alchemab Ther­a­peu­tics, bit.bio, Cutiss AG, Gala­pa­gos NV, Kolib­ri, Lesaf­fre, PetMedix™, Sanofi, Selex­is SA, Syn­gen­ta and TATAA Biocenter.

The com­pa­ny’s Euro­pean team now con­sists of more than 60 peo­ple, includ­ing exec­u­tives with exten­sive expe­ri­ence in build­ing and scal­ing large tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies. Over the next twelve months, Bench­ling will expand its Euro­pean head­quar­ters in Zurich and dou­ble the num­ber of employee:s in the region across all cus­tomer-fac­ing busi­ness units, includ­ing sales, ser­vices, mar­ket­ing and sup­port. Bench­ling was one of three com­pa­nies, along with Mod­er­na, to receive the 2021 Tell Award. This is award­ed for sig­nif­i­cant for­eign direct invest­ment in Switzerland.

As biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies come under increas­ing pres­sure to make break­throughs, they are opt­ing for advanced soft­ware to dig­i­tize their entire sci­en­tif­ic process­es and cen­tral­ize their data. “Biotech­nol­o­gy is rewrit­ing life as we know it. We sup­port near­ly 100 cus­tomers in Europe, and our grow­ing Zurich office under­scores our com­mit­ment to the mar­ket,” said Sajith Wick­ra­masekara, CEO and co-founder of Benchling.

“Our cus­tomers from near­ly every major indus­try are devel­op­ing more effec­tive med­i­cines, nutri­tious foods, and sus­tain­able crops, mate­ri­als, and fuels to solve human­i­ty’s most press­ing prob­lems. These chal­lenges are glob­al, so growth out­side the U.S. is a strate­gic pri­or­i­ty for us as we dri­ve mod­ern, data-dri­ven and col­lab­o­ra­tive research and development.”

“Syn­gen­ta’s work relies on scale as our researchers test hun­dreds of thou­sands of seeds in dif­fer­ent grow­ing envi­ron­ments. When we dis­cov­er viable can­di­dates to meet grow­ers’ needs, we need to rapid­ly scale up seed stocks to enable test­ing in labs, green­hous­es and field tri­als around the world. Thanks to Bench­ling, we have moved away from paper and our glob­al seed R&D teams can col­lab­o­rate effi­cient­ly on a sin­gle plat­form to stan­dard­ize seed vari­ety devel­op­ment from the lab to the test field. This has allowed us to restruc­ture much of our work to accel­er­ate the time to mar­ket for new seed products.”

- Char­lie Bax­ter, Head of Traits, Reg­u­la­to­ry, and Prod­uct Safety

The Group is deploying the next generation of scientists in both academia and industry:

• The R&D Cloud is used by more than 600 com­pa­nies, includ­ing some of the world’s most inno­v­a­tive biotech com­pa­nies and 22 of the 50 largest glob­al bio­phar­ma companies.
• Because the com­pa­ny has always offered a free com­mu­ni­ty edi­tion for aca­d­e­mics, the com­pa­ny’s com­mu­ni­ty has grown to over 200,000 sci­en­tists at more than 7,000 aca­d­e­m­ic and research institutions.