Lessons in leadership: Automata’s revolutionary approach to lab work
As we shine a light this month on the incredible work being done by our portfolio companies, Octopus Ventures Partner Kamran Adle, tells the story of Automata – and highlights some of the key learnings for founders with future-shaping ambitions.
When we first invested in Automata, back in early 2022, the world looked very different. Emerging from the COVID pandemic, the demand to process millions of PCR tests every month in the UK placed an unprecedented strain on labs around the country – and beyond.
Automata’s solution was urgent: a hardware product, supported by a best-in-class software component, designed to automate any number of manual workflows in a lab. It worked brilliantly, but to invest, we sought confidence that the opportunity wasn’t just limited to the most cutting-edge, innovative customers. We needed to know that enterprise-scale operators, with slower-moving procurement processes and legacy lab infrastructure, were also going to jump at the opportunity to embrace the labs of the future.
Flash forward to today – and they have. Automata’s partners don’t just include innovative biotech companies, but some of the most significant health institutions in the world, including world-leading global pharmaceutical companies and leading NHS Trusts.
In this blog I’m going to explore some of what Automata got right – and pick out the key learnings for pioneering health tech founders, hoping to follow in their footsteps.
Excellence in design
When we met Automata, their offering was far less comprehensive than it is today. Their first product was a robotic arm, designed to automate routine lab activity and processes. Since then, their hardware has grown and evolved. Their robotics-augmented lab bench, the LINQ Bench, is perfectly optimised to adapt to meet the demands of most labs; modular in design, it can be configured to the needs of any individual customer, designed for maximum density of instruments.
The results speak for themselves. When they implemented Automata’s solution, a flagship NHS customer tripled its PCR testing capacity, reducing staff costs by 76% and increasing the number of samples they could process per square metre from 94 to 639. Automata’s platform drives a 5x increase in throughput (the amount of material being processed) and over 95% reduction in manual interactions.
The company’s hardware is supported by a software layer, which allows users to create workflows and captures the results, at the same time as creating a data lake for use in further optimising workflows the next time around.
The result of these advantages is a broadening of Automata’s addressable market. Because their product is modular, it can meet the needs of a smaller lab just as well as a big one: it’s simply a question of adding more workcells and configuring them. Automata’s continued investment into product and iteration through different stages of design has ensured that their ability to add value has scaled at pace. But that’s not the only thing they’ve done right.
Engaging with customer experience
In order to iterate in the right way, Automata has made a feature of staying close to their customers and understanding how they interact with their product. This approach hasn’t just benefitted their product: it’s also unlocked an innovative approach to sales. Selling hardware comes with challenges that a pure SaaS company doesn’t face. While a software product is ready to ship as soon as the contract is signed, technically complex, made-to-order robotic components tell a different story.
This was a major challenge the company had to navigate in its early years: with three mammoth customers in the pipeline at a given moment in time, the simple reality was that they couldn’t deliver to each of them concurrently. From installation of the equipment to the initial phase of integration and training, Auomata would have been overstretched, with potentially catastrophic results.
Their approach was different: extending the logic of great customer experience, they developed a deep understanding of their customer needs, from the buying process through to integration in the lab. Using these insights, they built a sales pipeline that allowed them to deliver to each of their customers, dovetailing things so that each got an experience that delighted them – and a service that improved the efficiency of their labs.
It’s taken them a couple of years to nail that sales cycle motion down, but it’s been time well spent, and other founders should take note. Setting up a sales cycle that you can be sure of delivering on, is closely tied to customer understanding: not just in terms of their procurement processes, but in terms of their post-sale needs as well.
It’s a question of installation integration. More relevant for Automata, because of their hardware product, no doubt, but applicable to all founders. In 2025 Automata’s post-sale, installation integration processes are nailed down. From installation and configuring the product to work on-site, to a period of hypercare, troubleshooting issues and ensuring the lab operators have the knowledgebase required to deal with them, Automata takes care of things in about a month. It’s speedy, but it’s only become that way because of Automata’s commitment to understanding their customers.
An agile, innovative customer with no legacy systems that need to be taken out and replaced is likely to require less hands-on support than a client for whom installation of Automata services represents a radical departure from a long-established norm.
Of course, when it comes to understanding customers, Automata has some advantages: for one, they’re working on fewer, very high value contracts every year than a SaaS business might be. It’s left them with more resource to dedicate to building an understanding of who’s on the other side, how they operate and how the Automata solution is going to fit into their lab.
But one lesson that’s universally applicable is this: knowing who your key stakeholders are. Rather than just getting to know a CFO or CEO, who’s been brought into the contract via c-level conversations, Automata has always understood the importance of demonstrating value to the operators who use the product.
A top-down approach is important, but it’s best supported from the bottom-up. Ensuring lab managers and lab operators have a great experience, and showing them the advantages of the service, has been instrumental in Automata’s success. As decision makers, leadership matters, but the end user should never be forgotten.
Our support
We were proud to lead Automata’s Series B and make our contribution towards growing a business that’s reimagining lab work on a global scale. Our People + Talent team, dedicated to supporting all the companies we invest into with all things talent, helped the Company recruit its CFO, and we built other, lasting relationships as well. It’s also great to see other friendly faces around the board. My former colleague, Joe Stringer, led the investment into Automata from our side back in 2022. After leaving he joined on with Automata, and today he spends a substantial amount of time supporting the company, especially in all their Corporate Development endeavours and their dealings with the NHS.
Automata’s story teaches us that a world-changing product is just one piece of the complex puzzle of start-up success. To reach truly global heights requires innovation in all things, from pushing new frontiers of customer understanding and service, to iteration. Innovation doesn’t just happen once; it’s a practice to be maintained and leveraged to overcome every challenge a scaling start-up faces.
If Automata’s story chimes with you, and you’d like to learn more about the support we offer our portfolio companies, take a look at our website. And if you have a world-changing health tech solution you think we should know about – get in touch. You can start a conversation here.