Benchling Announces New Executive Appointments and 1,000 Customer Milestone

SAN FRANCISCO, August 25, 2022 – Benchling, the R&D Cloud powering the biotechnology industry, announced the appointment of new executive leadership to its engineering and field organizations. These hires come at the same time the company achieved significant financial milestones. In the first half of its fiscal year, Benchling surpassed 1,000 customers and increased subscription revenue 90% year-over-year. Dollar-based net expansion was greater than 150%, indicative of customers rapidly growing their use of the R&D Cloud.

Benchling appointed Stephen Deasy as the company’s first Chief Technology Officer. He has 20 years of experience scaling platform, infrastructure, and product engineering teams at high-growth software companies. Deasy will be responsible for leading Benchling’s technology strategy and growing its engineering team. While at Atlassian, he led the cloud platform and infrastructure groups before his role expanded to encompass all of product engineering, including products such as Jira, Confluence, and Trello. He played a key role in Atlassian’s transition to the cloud and in scaling the global engineering organization during his six-year tenure. Prior to Atlassian, he led engineering teams at Groupon, VMware, and EMC.

“We are honored to hear our customers — from emerging startups to Fortune 500 — tell us that Benchling is becoming the standard for cutting-edge biotechnology R&D," said Sajith Wickramasekara, co-founder and CEO of Benchling. "We are investing in expanding our R&D Cloud. Our customers are pushing into new scientific frontiers and the R&D Cloud enables them to bring transformative products to market, faster. The addition of Stephen to our leadership team will position us to accelerate this goal while continuing to build a world-class engineering organization." 

“In my career, the things that I’ve enjoyed most are being close to technology as it scales and building out the people-power behind that scale,” said Stephen Deasy, Chief Technology Officer at Benchling. “I was drawn to Benchling because of the opportunity to work with a talented, mission-driven team to build the biotech industry’s only modern and connected R&D platform.”

In addition, Benchling welcomes Niall Wall to lead Global Partnerships and Rick Wright to lead Customer Experience. 

Niall Wall brings deep experience scaling global partnership programs, most recently as SVP for Global Partners and Business Development at Workday, and prior to that, having built Box’s partnership program from the ground up. In his role, he will focus on building a vibrant partner ecosystem that will bring the R&D Cloud to more biotech customers around the world and allow them to connect Benchling to other essential systems they use.

Rick Wright joins Benchling from ServiceNow, where he served as the global leader for ServiceNow's Customer Outcomes organization. In his role, he will lead and scale Benchling’s professional services, customer success, and support practices globally. Prior to ServiceNow, Wright spent more than 20 years at KPMG, where he led digital transformation efforts.