SoftBank invests in robotics company behind New York City's COVID-19 testing

(Bloomberg) -- SoftBank Group Corp. led a $200 million investment in a robotics startup that has helped drive New York City’s coronavirus testing drive, valuing the company at $1.8 billion.

Opentrons Labworks Inc. was founded in Brooklyn in 2013 and was valued at $90 million a year ago. Last summer, the company helped set up New York's pandemic response laboratory to alleviate the city's massive testing delays. Opentrons' robots speed up the process by freeing humans from performing repetitive tasks themselves, helping the city now test up to 45,000 swabs per day.

The pandemic has fueled investor interest in life sciences and robotics companies, which are key industries in responding to the coronavirus outbreak and are critical to preventing future outbreaks. U.S. robotics companies have raised $4.3 billion in funding this year, more than double the same period last year, according to PitchBook Data. Life sciences companies have raised a record $34.8 billion in funding so far in 2021.

Opentrons sits at the intersection of these two industries, creating robots to help life scientists automate many experiments and processes.

In July 2020, Covid-19 tests took seven to 14 days to return to New York and cost up to $2,000. Opentrons' process at the Pandemic Response Laboratory (PRL) shortened the results window to 24 hours and cut costs to less than $28. PRL has also been at the forefront of virus sequencing in the United States, discovering the Delta mutation in late April and identifying the first cases of the South African variant in a New York resident. Sequencing mutations in viral genomes is important to understand which variants are present and how widely they proliferate.

Opentrons has since tested 2 million New Yorkers and set up additional Covid-19 centers in Washington and Los Angeles. The centers conduct "batch testing" for schools, testing students in groups at a cost of about $1 per child and providing results the next day, making big-city systems like New York affordable and efficient. Government agencies, hospitals and businesses can also conduct joint testing, and Opentrons is exploring opening labs in other communities as part of the government's efforts to get Americans back to work. President Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring large private employers to mandate vaccinations or conduct regular testing.

"We see these labs as a critical part of the infrastructure to respond to any epidemic," CEO Jonathan Brennan-Badal said in an interview. They allow Opentron to quickly deploy new tests , run them affordably and sequence positive cases to continue tracking the emergence of new variants. "Biology has opened the door to solving many of the grand challenges facing humanity," Brennan-Badahl said in a separate statement. "For too long, scientists and clinicians have been hampered by slow, expensive and overly complex laboratory solutions. Bound by solutions, these solutions underpin their work.”

SoftBank Vision Funds 2 director Angela Du led the round after discovering Opentrons through her spouse, a research scientist who uses the company's technology in her work. Brennan-Badahl said that's how the company often looks for investors. Opentrons continues to grow, supporting the Department of Education community of more than 1,000 scientists from 46 countries. The network gives Opentrons first-look at innovations from thousands of different customers. When it sees a groundbreaking invention, Opentrons uses its robots to help bring it to the masses.

Khosla Ventures also participated in the round, and former Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler is an investor. Opentrons also recently added Moderna Inc. co-founder Robert Langer to its team. Langer is also one of 12 institute professors at MIT who leads the scientific advisory board for Opentrons subsidiary Neochromosome.

The addition of Langer demonstrates Opentrons' ambitions in the vaccine business as well as drug development and therapeutics.

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