An automation company powering life sciences labs has raised £33 million to accelerate its rapid growth and industry presence across the US, UK and EMEA.
London-based Automata’s LINQ platform is designed to make automation easily adoptable by science labs across research institutions, hospital groups and pharmaceutical and BioTech companies.
Its technology aims to reduce drug development and testing timelines, costs and error rates. Current customers include NHS Trusts such as The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, academic institutions including The Francis Crick Institute, testing labs and pharma and BioTech companies such as AstraZeneca and bit.bio.
Dimension led the round with participation from A.P. Moller Holding, parent company of the A.P. Moller Group and owners of, amongst other businesses, laboratory testing group Unilabs. They have invested alongside returning investors, Octopus Ventures, Hummingbird, Isomer Capital, Possible Ventures and Aldea Ventures.
The proceeds will be used to fund Automata’s geographic and team expansion plans, focusing the business on the fast-growing opportunities in the global life sciences sector and developing its brand recognition and presence in the industry.
The firm raised a $50m Series B round in January 2022 which enabled the team to deliver on its initial commercialisation and expansion plans, in particular its deployment footprint in Europe and the UK and rapid growth in the US.
Since then Automata has seen 150% revenue growth and a 12-times increase in live system hours in customer-deployed systems.
“The last two years have been hugely exciting at Automata as we’ve seen LINQ increase the scale of customer workflows as well as meaningfully increasing their ability to generate high quality data – accelerating their pace of discovery and experimentation,” said Mostafa Elsayed, founder and CEO.
“Achieving a fundraise with exciting and experienced investors in a pretty challenging funding environment is a real endorsement of the potential and capabilities of our lab automation platform and the work the team has achieved.
“The raise enables us to continue to focus on our existing and upcoming deployments as well as continuing to develop products that transform how scientists interact with their labs. Most importantly, it will help us to accelerate the impact our users are already having on people’s lives around the world.”
Nan Li, co-founder and managing partner of Dimension, added: “The modern lab is a data factory, requiring precise coordination across a suite of lab instruments juggling multiple protocol runs.
“As a result, the industry needs a lab automation system that is built with an emphasis on speed, reliability, reconfigurability, reproducibility, and scale.
“Automata’s modular software and hardware LINQ system delivers just that and we’re thrilled to partner with them to build a category-defining business in this space.”