Transcriptic is a startup that’s trying to let grad students and researchers conduct their experiments over the web. The company offers a lab-as-a-service product and hopes to take some of the economics from the cloud and apply them to scientific research.
Transcriptic, a startup trying to bring the concepts from the cloud and collaborative consumption to biology has raised a $1.2 million seed round from a broad group of investors including Google Ventures and FF Angel, and private investors Mark Cuban and Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList. The round includes more than 60 individuals and $150,000 brought on via SecondMarket.
Transcriptic, which was founded earlier this year, has built out a biological testing lab using robotic equipment that researchers use to prepare samples. What’s cool about this is Max Hodak, the company’s founder, is trying to take expensive and proprietary equipment, hack it so people can program the machines via the web and then offer the results as a service to academia.
Building a bio-cloud
In biology labs around the country graduate students spend their days filling test tubes and testing samples. It’s boring work and something that well-funded companies in the pharmaceutical industry automate or outsource. But the equipment used in automating those processes are hundreds of thousands of dollars and generally out of range for biology departments. So are the services of outsourcers that sometimes work on behalf of the industry.
So Hodak created what he calls a cloud for biology, but what is really more of a collaborative consumption model aided by open source software and robotics, than an on-demand cloud. In a Menlo Park, Calif. lab Transcriptics owns several large pieces of used testing equipment such as centrifuges, incubators and high-powered microscopes that it purchased for roughly 10 cents on the dollar whose software it has reverse engineered. The company then wrote new software that controls the machines and can run common biological operations such as closing plasmids with other options coming later. For complete story read here