Canadian startup helps scientists
The Toronto lab works with all the major pharmaceutical companies.
Toronto-based startup BenchSci uses artificial intelligence to help pharmaceutical companies accelerate research and development. BenchSci recently received CAD 95 million in funding for its research.
Company executives have already announced that they are ready to use this capital to expand their artificial intelligence-based drug development platform. BenchSci claims that their ASCEND software decisively enables scientists to increase the success of research.
Additional investments, support from regular sponsors, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore's Generation Investment Management brought the total funding to CAD 218 million.
BenchSci CEO and co-founder Liran Belenzon hailed the investment as "validation of the work its team has done and the traction that BenchSci has generated with large pharma and biotech firms around the world."
Today BenchSci works with 16 of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. Among them are giants like Moderna, AstraZeneca, Sanofi. BenchSci's connections also include about 4 500 research centers around the Globe.
In 2021, BenchSci was gaining traction in the market with its artificial intelligence reagent matching application and was developing ASCEND, its corporate artificial intelligence platform for research and development. The platform was released in 2023.
Startup was launched in 2015.
Its founders Tom Leung, David Q. Chen, Elvis Wianda, and Liran Belenzon met at the University of Toronto Creative Destruction Lab in 2015. Together they created, tested and validated the use of artificial intelligence to reproduce antibodies.
One of the venture capital funds got interested and invested CAD 10 million in the startup.
In 2017, the first app called "Antibody Selection with Artificial Intelligence" was created. The program is designed to help scientists reduce the number of failures in experiments. Within just a few years, more than 50 000 scientists began relying on BenchSci in their experiments.
The company is now focused on the recently launched ASCEND platform.
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