Kitchener-Waterloo-based Scispot, which wants to help life sciences labs move faster using AI, has secured $8 million USD ($11.1 million CAD) in Series A funding to bring its platform to more companies.
Scispot has developed AI-powered software designed to help workers in life sciences labs—such as research facilities that focus on drug development or pathology—centralize and automate the typically fragmented and time-consuming processes of experiment planning, execution, documentation, and inventory tracking.
“The goal is to solve this problem for the largest life science labs across the globe, but building from Canada.”
Guru Singh, Scispot
In an interview with BetaKit, Scispot co-founder and CEO Guru Singh said the startup has achieved “clear product-market fit,” with over 125 life sciences labs already using its tech, but that it is struggling to keep pace with demand. With this round, the company hopes to scale and capture more of the opportunity it sees in providing the “operating layer” these labs need to bring their research to market faster.
Scispot’s broader vision is to enable “self-driving labs,” where routine coordination, data capture, analysis, and reporting are largely automated but scientists and lab operators keep control over judgment, review, validation, and sign-off.
The company’s all-equity, all-primary capital Series A round closed a couple of weeks ago. It was led by new Washington, DC-based investor Avenue Growth Partners. Existing Seattle backer Breakwater Ventures also participated in the financing, which brings Scispot’s total funding to nearly $10 million USD. Singh did not share Scispot’s valuation.
A molecular biologist by training, Singh got his start in the lab world before moving to more commercial leadership roles at Scientist.com, Science Exchange, and Labtwin. He said this gives him a firsthand understanding of the pain points labs face. That understanding is complemented by his brother, co-founder and CTO Satya Singh, who has previously worked with Expedia Group.
According to Guru Singh, the data and digital work of many biotech and pharmaceutical companies is spread across a multitude of systems, from spreadsheets to lab systems, robotics, other hardware, and electronic notebooks. That makes it tough for them to leverage AI and automation. This insight spurred the Singh brothers to build a “control panel.”
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“The goal is to solve this problem for the largest life sciences labs across the globe, but building from Canada,” Singh said.
When the Y Combinator graduate first launched five years ago, Singh said the startup’s original pitch was to help labs to ensure they were ready for AI. But at the time, he said, “AI was still a luxury. It was not a painkiller.” Aside from some outliers, “labs were not really thinking about it,” he added. This made the first two years of Scispot’s existence difficult.
But when ChatGPT dropped in late 2022, he said, labs quickly began to change their tune and their interest in AI readiness spiked. “That’s when we became a must-have,” Singh said. “We started receiving more demand than we could really handle.”
Today, the CEO said Scispot still finds itself in a position where it must “say no politely” to many prospective clients. He said this drove the startup to raise this round. Scispot plans to put the majority of its Series A capital towards what Singh described as a Palantir-like model, adding more forward-deployed AI engineers and scientists to its 30-person team to help clients adopt its tech.
At the moment, three-quarters of Scispot’s customers and most of its investors are from the US. If the startup wanted to turn a quick buck and orchestrate a sale within a few years, Singh said Silicon Valley would likely be the ideal base of operations.
But the CEO hopes to build a more “durable” business, and said he thinks Canada remains one of the best places from which to do that, citing the country’s “exceptional” talent pool and supportive government innovation programs as two factors that have driven Scispot to stay. Thus far, he said, that bet has been “paying off.”
Feature image courtesy Scispot.