Automata raises $45 million for AI-enabled laboratory automation
Series C financing is intended to drive scalable software-defined laboratory processes and accelerate AI-driven drug discovery
Automata, the lab automation company building fully integrated, AI-ready platforms for life sciences, announced the close of a $45 million Series C funding round led by Dimension with participation from Danaher Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, Octopus Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, and others. The round also includes a strategic investment partnership with Danaher Corporation, with Murali Venkatesan Ph.D., Global Head of Danaher Ventures and Vice President of Science Technology and Innovation, joining the Board of Directors.
Closing the Gap Between AI and Physical Experimentation
While artificial intelligence has revolutionized computational biology, the physical work of life sciences remains bottlenecked by manual, fragmented lab workflows. Automata is solving this disconnect by building the reference architecture for autonomous wet labs—combining modular robotics, orchestration software, and unified data infrastructure to transform physical labs into programmable, repeatable, AI-ready systems.
"AI-first biology requires fundamentally different infrastructure," said Mostafa Elsayed, CEO of Automata. "We're building the operating layer between AI models and the physical lab—enabling labs to run autonomously rather than as bespoke workshops. This funding allows us to scale that vision with customers who are already redefining what's possible in experimental science."
Automata now counts five top pharma companies among its customers, with growth driven by repeat deployments and partnerships on some of the industry's largest automation projects. The platform is delivering measurable gains in experimental throughput, reproducibility, and resource efficiency across pharmaceutical, biotech, and advanced research environments.
“Scalable, software-defined lab operations are foundational to the AI wave in life science,” said Nan Li, Founder and Managing Partner of Dimension. “Automata is building the technology stack to power modern labs and has emerged as a leader in this exciting new chapter for lab automation.”
Deploying Capital for Scale
The new funding will be deployed to:
- Scale customer deployments across leading pharma, biotech, and research organizations globally.
- Build the next iteration of our data and closed-loop experimentation software platform, further unlocking self-serve in AI-driven drug discovery.
- Expand global operations, growing engineering, product, and customer success teams to support rapid adoption.
Strategic Investment Partnership with Danaher
The Danaher investment partnership unites Automata's automation platform with Danaher's leading portfolio of instruments, reagents, and software, creating end-to-end solutions for labs under pressure to accelerate discovery while optimizing resources. Technologies from Danaher companies, including Molecular Devices and Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, will integrate Automata’s software to expand their capabilities and accelerate delivery of results.
“Advancements in robotics and automation, AI, compute, and instrumentation are powering the next wave of biological insights. We are proud to partner with Automata to accelerate customer workflows across drug discovery and development, foundational model development for biological systems, and automate advanced diagnostics,” said Venkatesan.
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