Investment thesis
- The now $200bn global laboratory market has relied on human led, repetitive processes since the industry evolved, creating a bottleneck in medium and high throughput environments.
- Covid has made the strain on labs even more evident, with around half-a-million PCR tests being processed every week in the UK alone. In response, the UK government has made significant investment into diagnostic testing facilities, as well as epidemic response infrastructure.
- One solution lies in automating some of the manual processes necessary in diagnostics and testing labs to increase handling capacity.
- Automata has already successfully designed and manufactured a low-cost collaborative robot at scale. The $50m Series B, led by Octopus Ventures, will help fund scale-up and expand deployment of automation in lab workflows, in the UK and internationally.
- The company aims to build and further expand its solutions to become central to every lab, integrating with hardware, diagnostic tools and lab information management systems.
- With a growing list of customers in both the NHS and private sector, we strongly believe Automata’s solutions and unique go-to-market approach have the potential to drive automation across the life sciences sector – starting with diagnostics, drug discovery and microbiology.
