After Mark Fischer-Colbrie sold liquid-handling company Labcyte, where he’d been CEO for more than a decade, to a division of Danaher in 2019, he could have retired. But when Fischer-Colbrie, now 64, heard about the opportunity to become CEO of Strateos, a Menlo Park, California-based startup that develops remote-access labs and lab-control software for life sciences research, he signed on.

“I didn’t have to do this,” he says. “I could’ve gone off to do other things or not worked at all. But this is such a big opportunity to rethink how life sciences research is done.”

His vision: A worldwide network of these remote-controlled labs that could work with both chemistry and biology. Today, Strateos said that it had raised $56 million, led by DCVC and Lux Capital, to build out that vision. The new investment brings Strateos’s total funding to around $90 million at an estimated valuation of $200 million.

“The sophistication of Strateos’s software and robotics make it possible to command, copy and modify complex experiments, run them in parallel and deliver insights and results, in many cases exponentially faster and at dramatically lower cost,” says Matt Ocko, a managing partner at DCVC, who first invested in the company back at the seed round.

Back in 2012, Max Hodak founded Strateos predecessor company Transcriptic straight out of college at Duke University. Hodak had already built and sold a previous startup, called MyFit, which focused on helping students identify the right colleges. But as a student researcher, he grew frustrated with the amount of wasted time in the lab and the difficulties scientists have doing what are essentially detailed, robotic processes like transferring minuscule amounts of liquid. With Transcriptic, he developed a robotic cloud laboratory platform for life sciences research.

In 2019, Transcriptic merged with 3Scan, which uses automation, machine learning and computer vision to extract spatial data from tissue samples and create detailed 3D representations. The merged company, named Strateos, hired Fischer-Colbrie as its new CEO. Fischer-Colbrie, who competes in Ironman and Half Ironman triathlons (”just to stay in shape,” he says), had previously helped take three companies public before becoming CEO of Labcyte. “Mark is the antithesis of the preening rock star CEO,” Ocko says.

“This represents a real shift to flexible automation and industrialization. Labs should be thought of as data engines.”

Deep tech like this is hard, and the company has largely been under the radar as it built the software and began to deploy it. Last year, it unveiled its first 11,500-square-foot remote-access lab in San Diego, in conjunction with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, to accelerate drug discovery. It also has a smaller lab in Menlo Park, and has signed on some 100 customers, including biotech firms like Amgen and Abbvie, synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks, and the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, for projects or software.

Historically, Fischer-Colbrie says, scientific labs have been “shockingly poor” at getting good data, which has slowed down their research efforts. “A lot of life sciences is done 1850s-style,” he says. “It takes a long time and it costs a lot.”

Strateos’s software, by contrast, can combine robotic machinery together in automated modules, and allow researchers to run their labs from anywhere. At Strateos, Fischer-Colbrie figures there’s an opportunity to increase revenue from tens of millions today (he declines to be more exact) to hundreds of millions as the company deploys its labs worldwide. “This represents a real shift to flexible automation and industrialization,” he says. “Labs should be thought of as data engines.”

In a video tour of the sprawling San Diego lab, the gleaming equipment of 23 robotic modules connected with a giant automated track, looks more like a chip foundry. With Strateos, users log into a web app and the software guides the experiments, determining where the robotic arms should move the materials or what temperature and pressure a reactor should use. Strateos now runs the lab and can offer its capacity to customers beyond Lilly, using privacy controls in the software to keep different customers’ experiments and data separate. Scale? The facility is capable of doing 190,000 experiments per day. “When you are inside this building, you feel like you are in a silicon wafer foundry or a data center,” says Ben Miles, Strateos’s head of product. “There’s the hum of the HVAC going, and all these robots doing everything in the module.”

The combination of better data and more automation should speed up drug discovery and advances in synthetic biology. A new therapeutic might take 60 cycles of variations, Fischer-Colbrie says, and if each one takes weeks or months that adds up to years of discovery work. “We think we can cut that time in half at least, and that’s before you add in the AI tools. That’s just raw speed and data reliability,” he says. 

Fischer-Colbrie ultimately envisions scores of these giant, automated labs across the globe, including in Europe and Asia. The company is currently in talks with potential partners to open a lab on the East Coast, he says, though those plans remain at the discussion stage. Even earlier stage is the company’s technology for tissue sampling. “If you can accelerate discovery,” he says, “you can go after medium or small markets, or even rare disease areas, economically.”