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Benchling Doubles Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for Fourth Straight Year Amid COVID-19 Pandemic
The leading life sciences R&D cloud added 150 customers, including biotech innovators Gilead Sciences, Sanofi, and UCB
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., January 14, 2021 — With biotech seizing headlines amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Benchling - the industry’s most widely adopted life science R&D cloud - closed another record-breaking year. The company doubled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the fourth year in a row while adding more than 150 customers in industries spanning biopharmaceuticals, biomaterials, agriculture, renewable energy, fragrances and food.
Benchling’s business achievements for 2020 include:
Speeding breakthroughs: Customers working on treatments for COVID-19 estimated that using Benchling shortened their time to deliver multiple antibody treatments to market by 70%.
Rapidly growing customer base: Since launching in 2012, more than 270,000 scientists and 1,000 R&D organizations have adopted Benchling's cloud platform. Notable new customers added in 2020 include Gilead Sciences, Sanofi, UCB, and Corteva Agriscience.
Continued customer satisfaction and retention: Benchling maintains a 99% retention rate across its customer base, and the average customer expanded their Benchling deployment by 52% this year.
Greater adoption by the enterprise: Forty-three percent of Benchling’s new revenue came from the top 50 life sciences companies in the world, up from 23% in 2019.
Continued demand from biotech startups: Benchling's startup customer base increased by over 50%, expanding the company’s footprint in supporting the cutting-edge of biotech research.
Global expansion: Benchling opened its EMEA headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, to support key customers.
"Benchling has been a game-changer for Sanofi," said Brian McNatt, Director - R&D Digital, Sanofi. "Adopting the Benchling platform has vastly increased the efficiency of our research, saving each of our scientists nearly an entire day per week while doubling the speed of collaboration. Those are substantial improvements that empower our scientists to focus on what they do best: achieving research advances that address pressing challenges."
Scientists at organizations such as Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Mammoth Biosciences, Corteva Agriscience, UCSF and more rely on Benchling’s cloud suite to develop diagnostics and therapeutics for COVID-19, as well as to scale testing. Since the pandemic began, customers working on COVID-19 increased their activity on the platform by 54% as Benchling became even more critical to their research operations. Additionally, customers have run millions of COVID diagnostic tests on Benchling.
“This has been a transformative year for biotech. Never before has the speed to research breakthroughs been so critical to all our lives,” said Sajith Wickramasekara, CEO and co-founder at Benchling. “If there’s an upside to this year, it’s that COVID-19 has pushed the industry over a tipping point to embrace cutting-edge tools that can accelerate a solution to this crisis—and to other major challenges facing humanity. We’re committed to empowering enterprises and biotech startups alike to build world-changing breakthroughs on Benchling.”
In 2020, Benchling closed $50 million in Series D funding and was named to the 2020 Cloud 100 and heralded as a Next Billion-Dollar Company by Forbes. Benchling also launched two new products to accelerate research breakthroughs: Benchling for Lab Automation, which enables researchers to integrate robotics to run high-throughput experiments; and Benchling Insights, which enables researchers to better visualize and understand complex datasets.
Powering breakthroughs for over 1,200 biotechnology companies, from startups to Fortune 500s