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The biotech business Automata Technologies, located in London, revealed that it has raised $40 million (about €38.2 million) in a new investment round. Automata Technologies provides robotic automation solutions to life sciences labs.

Following the success of its $50M Series B investment in January 2022, Automata received $40M in funding. The firm has increased its commercialization efforts thanks to this finance, particularly in Europe, the UK, and the US.

Since its latest fundraising round, Automata claims to have grown significantly, with a 150% increase in income and a 12-fold increase in active system hours.

Financial backers of Automata

A.P. Moller Holding, the parent firm of the A.P. Moller Group, joined Dimension in leading the investment. Additionally, current investors Octopus Ventures, Hummingbird, Isomer Capital, Possible Ventures, and Aldea Ventures made contributions.

The contemporary lab is a data factory, needing precise coordination across various lab instruments while juggling many protocol runs, according to Nan Li, co-founder and managing partner of Dimension. Because of this, the sector requires a lab automation system that emphasizes speed, dependability, adaptability, repeatability, and scale.

“Automata’s modular hardware and software LINQ system delivers just that, and we’re thrilled to partner with them to build a category-defining business in this space,” Li furthers.

A.P. Moller Holding’s Chetan Mehta, Head of Growth Equity, continues, “Automata’s solutions help increase throughput, lower cost, and accelerate innovation, allowing its customers to focus on pushing further into cutting-edge medical and life science research.”

Automata seeks to use automation to maximize human potential.

Automata claims it can help scientific organizations overcome problems, including lack of lab space, quick and flexible experimentation requirements, and difficulty hiring and maintaining qualified personnel.

The company’s LINQ automation platform is made to be used by hospitals, pharmaceuticals, biotech, and CRO laboratories, and research organizations.

It offers dynamic protocol creation and supports high throughput processes and laboratories needing frequent workflow modifications.

The LINQ platform from Automata helps labs optimize operations and improve productivity in response to changing scientific requirements by offering adaptive automation solutions.

NHS Trusts like The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, academic institutions like The Francis Crick Institute, testing laboratories like HSL, CDMOs, and CROs, as well as pharmaceutical and biotech firms like AstraZeneca and bit. Bio is one of Automata’s clients.

What gave rise to Automata?

Architects from Zaha Hadid’s research lab, Mostafa ElSayed and Suryansh Chandra (who left the company in March 2020), first investigated robots for use in architectural engineering. They believed that contemporary automation, not only in their industry but in many others, was overly complicated and inhibited creativity.

They established Automata to enable innovation through simpler automation, bringing together a team of industry specialists to make a real impact. They did this by using their skills in computational research and design.

A Brief Overview of Automata Technologies

Automata, founded in 2015, specializes in streamlining automation in the health sciences industry. With its technologies, scientists can quickly innovate, diagnose, and find new things at a large scale, which frees up more time for analysis and faster turnaround times.

NHS pathology laboratories have used Automata’s technology to alleviate diagnostic backlogs and greatly increase lab capacity, with some labs running 40 automated stations around the clock.

For clients such as NHS Trusts, academic institutions, Contract Development and Manufacturing Organizations (CDMOs), and pharmaceutical corporations, the company claims its Lab Automation platform empowers scientists, speeds the translation of findings, and improves efficiency.

With software for workflow management, proprietary hardware enabling modular configurations and high throughputs, extensive data accessibility throughout experiments, and an OEM-agnostic approach for seamless integration with various labs and equipment, Automata’s LINQ automation platform provides a comprehensive solution for labs.

This platform gives scientists more control, boosts productivity, and encourages flexible lab automation.

At the moment, Automata has operations in Boston, USA, as well as London, UK.

Utilization of capital

The additional funding will enable Automata to grow its workforce and strengthen its US, UK, and EMEA footprint. The firm also seeks to concentrate on chances in the international life sciences sector to strengthen its brand awareness and market presence.

According to the company’s founder and CEO, Mostafa Elsayed, the last two years have been extremely exciting at Automata: “We’ve seen LINQ increase the scale of customer workflows and meaningfully increase their ability to generate high-quality data, accelerating their pace of discovery and experimentation.”

A genuine confirmation of the promise and capabilities of our lab automation platform and the work the team has accomplished is the achievement of fundraising with intriguing and experienced investors in a rather hard financing climate.

“The increase allows us to maintain our attention on our current and planned deployments and continue to create solutions that revolutionize how scientists engage with their facilities. The most significant benefit is that it will hasten our users’ current effect on people’s lives worldwide, continues Elsayed.

Pre-seed investment for Orquesta, the first all-in-one LLM Operations and Integration platform in Europe, has been obtained for €800,000. This amount exceeds the company’s intended goal.

Since its foundation in 2022, the Amsterdam-based firm has developed Europe’s first platform for merging several large language models (LLMs).

As it gets ready to create and publicly debut its platform in November 2023, the organization handles quick engineering and configuration.

The platform is planned to be available to SaaS businesses in North America, Europe, and Asia.

Orquesta is a no-code platform that encourages cooperation and effectiveness among software teams by eliminating the need for programming. It frees up engineers’ time, enabling product management to have a clear picture, and makes it simple for internal domain experts to check the precision of interactions.

With a user-friendly interface, the platform makes interactions, data collection, and testing simpler. It gathers input from consumers, subject-matter experts, and other AI models.

Orquesta asserts it is the only European business to provide such a solution now.

The financial success of Orquesta

Orquesta declared that the proceeds from its lucrative pre-seed round will go into platform development, the company’s upcoming launch, and the growth of the European market.

Curiosity VC led the round, with Spacetime, Adriaan Mol’s investment company, serving as co-lead. Other investors in the round included Golden Egg Check Capital, Magnetic Fund, Koen Köppen of Mollie, Milan Daniels and Max Klijnstra of Ottium, and Arjé Cahn of Bloomreach.

Sohrab Hosseini and his business partner, Anthony Diaz, founded Orquesta. This SaaS company provides a uniform gateway for directly integrating various LLM models from OpenAI, Azure, Google, Hugging Face, and Cohere.

“The accelerated development of new AI functionalities leads to increased fragmentation, complexity, and a need for speed within the technology landscape for our clients,” says Sohrab Hosseini, co-founder of Orquesta. This inhibits our clients’ already limited talent from concentrating on strategic tasks and growth.

Hosseini continues, “With one LLM gateway and all the required tools, Orquesta is their partner to stay competitive. “We are very enthusiastic about the focus and multidisciplinary experience of the different VCs and angels who match and support our level of ambition,” the statement continued.

According to Adriaan Mol, the founder of Dutch unicorns Mollie and Messagebird, as well as his investment vehicle Spacetime, “Orquesta has built a best-in-class no-code platform that allows engineers to focus on their proprietary product and shorten release cycles instead of managing LLM integrations, configurations, and rules.”

“With Orquesta, Sohrab, and Anthony have developed a no-code platform that allows companies to easily configure, test, and manage complex prompts and various LLMs, leading the market to assist companies in the application of these new Generative AI technologies,” says Herman Kienhuis, managing partner of Curiosity VC.

The fourth €200 million fund from Amsterdam’s SET Ventures has been unveiled, with €127 million already invested. The fund will support leaders in the energy transition as they develop a future energy system free of carbon. Twenty to twenty-five European energy transition entrepreneurs will receive investments from the fund.

The VC company wants to help Europe’s most forward-thinking energy startups succeed as industry leaders. The capital will solve the issue of the lack of adequate funding that plagues these businesses by being twice as large as the last fund.

The SET Fund IV fundraising effort included both experienced and novice investors. The European Investment Fund (EIF), Triodos Energy Transition Europe Fund, and Carbon Equity are a few of these financiers.

SET Ventures supports its portfolio businesses through numerous fundraising rounds by investing at the Series A stage across Europe.

SET Ventures partners Wouter Jonk, Anton Arts, Julia Padberg, Till Stenzel, and René Savelsberg lead the group in charge of overseeing SET Fund IV.

Driving the energy transition, SET Ventures aims to make the necessary adjustments in the energy transition and make them happen. The venture capital firm has made profitable investments in technologies related to EV charging, virtual power plants, mobile energy, flexibility trading, and energy efficiency.

“In digital technology for the energy transition, we consider SET a frontrunner. The EU and the EIF place a high value on this region, according to Marjut Falkstedt, executive officer of the EIF.

In addition, Falkstedt says, “We value our long-standing relationship and are eager to support their efforts to drive innovation in the energy transition, making a very real contribution to securing a better future for all of us on this planet.”

The foundation of SET Fund IV is the correlation between investing and climate returns. The fund depends on impact research and reporting supported by science across the entire investment lifecycle to achieve its goals.

“The world is deploying renewable energy assets at an unprecedented pace,” says Anton Arts, SET Ventures’s managing partner.

To advance the electrification of industry, transportation, and the built environment in the direction of net-zero climate objectives, Arts continues, “It is a generational investment opportunity to support digital technologies and business models that incorporate renewables at scale.

Regarding SET Ventures

Europe’s top energy venture capital investor, SET Ventures, was established in 2007. By supporting innovative entrepreneurs with the resources, network, and knowledge to generate both financial and social impact returns, the firm seeks to build a carbon-free energy infrastructure.

SET Ventures developed smart energy system solutions for various businesses to implement the energy transition. These solutions address a variety of sectors, from built environments to distributed energy systems.

The €9.5M Series SET Ventures was in charge of a fundraising round for the German company e-Mobilio earlier this month. The venture capital firm also recently supported the Hamburg-based heat management business Vilisto.