Opentrons raises $40 million Series E led by Avego, pitching its 11,000 lab robots to AI-driven science

Opentrons, a New York City maker of laboratory robots, has raised a $40 million Series E led by healthcare investor Avego, with BroadOak Capital Partners also investing, the company announced on Oct. 29. SoftBank Vision Fund and Khosla Ventures are existing backers. The money goes to AI-driven experiment execution, faster protocol development and new markets.

What Opentrons is selling to investors is the fleet it already has. The company says more than 11,000 of its robots are in laboratories in over 80 countries, including every top-20 US research university and 90% of the top 20 global drugmakers. Its argument is that AI models now design experiments faster than labs can run them, and that robots already sitting on those benches, recording each run as structured data, are the quickest way to close the gap. CEO James Atwood put it as "autonomous science is standardizing on Opentrons."

A week earlier, Kevin Weil's Warp Sciences raised $215 million on the opposite plan: a preclinical contract lab in the US that starts with human chemists and automates their work over time. Opentrons is betting that customers would rather put AI on the robots they already own.

The round is a fifth the size of the $200 million Series C that SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led in 2021, when Opentrons said its OT-2 robot was used by thousands of research organizations in more than 40 countries.