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Danish startup grabs $20M in funding to bring more engineering to biology
A Danish startup wants to assist R&D team automatize lab experiments that require optical review , raising $ 20 million in a Series A one shot of backing to scale its technology in the U.S.
Reshape , which was founded out of Copenhagen in 2018 , has developed a machinelike imaging system full with package and AI models to help scientists track visual changes — such as colour or cell - maturation rates — from petri dishes and similar plate formats . Its machines athletics built - in incubation that can be place to specific temperature , with the corresponding data log to ensure the experiments can be easily repeated .
The benefit is that these experiments can be go 24/7 without direct supervising , resign up technicians for other critical tasks .
“Decoding nature”
The construct of “ decoding nature ” sit at the fondness of what Reshape is setting out to achieve , work up on a broader trend that has seen the lines obscure between the lifelike and manufactured worlds . These opportunities have not been lose on Silicon Valley , evidenced by thecountless money poured intotechnologies seeking to“engineer ” biota .
“ Biology as a whole is transitioning from a science to an engineering subject area , and I think one of the big things that we want to do is make some of the very ‘ intangible ’ — how does an object grow , how does it behave ? — easier to describe , ” Reshape CEOCarl - Emil Grøntold TechCrunch . “ Ideally , we want to figure out how we make that transformation level between what happens in the real humanity , and what happens in your DNA . ”
The generation for Reshape came when Grøn , who has an engine room background , jump date stamp someone who work in the biotech industriousness , giving him insight into the amount of manual effort involved in lab experiment .
“ I just assumed that biotech was massively automated , but every 8th hour , of every 24-hour interval , for five months square , she had to go in to the lab and take a photo of a petri ravisher , ” Grøn said . “ When you are from the tech world , it just seemed wild . ”
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After speaking to a bunch of biotech companies in the Copenhagen locale , Grøn substantiate that his initial experience was n’t some eldritch anomaly : The way that lab have a bun in the oven out deoxyribonucleic acid - sequencing , bar chemical substance composition and all the rest was still happening in more or less the same way as it had been done for more than a 100 .
So Grøn enlisted two cobalt - founders , Daniel StorgaardandMagnus Madsen , and set about building a full - great deal political platform , replete with high - closure tv camera and lighting , to capture visual data compass point and time lapses and immortalise how unlike constituent in a give experimentation react to the conditions they are subject to .
Under the hood
Reshape develops its own AI poser , trained on in - house data at its own laboratory , and these can work from the get - go for some of the more usual experimentation types , such as those involving fungous or bacterial hosts , or seed and insect . But the caller can also help its customers direct models for specific function cases , such as tracking how particular microbes comport under sure condition .
“ The Reshape data science team , using our impost - builtMLOpsarchitecture , handles this end - to - remnant , set off from understanding the trust output and quantification , gloss the want datasets at scale , developing and benchmarking models , and then deploying them in our ware for our customer , ” Grøn pronounce .
An husbandry company , for example , can expend Reshape to try out for seminal fluid germination pace , or the severity of a specific disease . Or a food for thought company can perform ingredient characterization to try for quality , freshness or how the ingredients mature over time — anything that typically requires a visual assessment .
Some Reshape client are using the chopine engineering science to transition from chemical to bio - pesticides — essentially , calculate out which new compounds work the expert and memorialise how they were made . And speed is finally the chief appeal for customers .
“ They ’ll do like four to 10 time as many experiment as they could before , which just entail that they get products to market much , much faster , ” Grøn said .
Reshape seduce the results available to view in a cloud - establish interface , but the platform also supports datum exportation in formatting such as LIMS or CSV , give up substance abuser to take their data point to other biotech software such asBenchlingor even just Excel .
In footing of truth , Grøn says that it compares the underlying model to the carrying into action of a human being on that same experimentation , handle metrics such as false negatives . This helps avoid scenario where an experiment might otherwise have been foreshorten myopic because the scientist cogitate the experiment was inefficient .
“ We help with about an 80 % step-down in false negative , ” Grøn said . “ We also help our customers reduce how much time they ask to get a termination . And instead of consume to rely on remember how you did an experiment a few year back , we keep unadulterated track of it . So every metre you run an experiment on the chopine , we track it ; repeatability is extremely important . ”
In price of business model , Reshape sells the full political platform as a subscription , which include the hardware , automobile scholarship and underlying software system . The pricing is charged on a “ economic value - base ” pricing model , which can variegate for each customer .
For now , Reshape ships just one size of machine , think if a customer has lots of experiments , then they must find lots of machines . So to scale this to elephantine industrial - grade experiments , Reshape might need bigger machines ; Grøn remained somewhat demure on this matter , but he suggested that they might “ branch out ” to bigger devices in the time to come .
Growth
A graduate of Y Combinator ’s ( YC)Winter 2021 batch , Reshape has amassed a fairly telling roll of clients , including Swiss agricultural technical school giantSyngentaand the University of Oxford . With another $ 20 million in the coin bank , which follow an$8.1 million seed round last year , Reshape read it project to use its fresh cash injectant to scale its business in the U.S. , where it says around two - third of its revenue already emanates , albeit mostly from its European customers ’ U.S. facilities .
“ We have proven that our technology works — now it ’s about scaling it and helping as many labs as possible to accelerate the biologic transition , ” Grøn said .
Others are also bring mechanisation to science science lab , including London ’s Automata , which enhance $ 40 million last yearto target the broader lab work flow . And some companies propose something similar to what Reshape is trying to do , such asSinger Instruments ’ PhenoBoothandInterscience ’s ScanStation .
But by providing a full - stack platform thoroughgoing with goal - to - end data point management that ’s good to go off the at-bat , Grøn reckons this is what congeal Reshape apart .
“ This is an expensive trouble that a lot of party have been trying to work for a farsighted time , ” Grøn said . “ We provide the incubation , image capture , and analysis in a shut - loop topology system . Our pre - train models are quick to go right out of the box and do n’t require time - ingest training . ”
Reshape ’s Series A cycle was led by European VC firmAstanor Ventures , with involvement from YC , R7,ACME,21stBioandUnity co - founder Nicholas Francis .
