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We are thrilled to announce that Trilobio has closed an oversubscribed $8M seed round led by Initialized Capital. Trilobio’s mission is to make fully automated biology available to everyone. To do this, we are reimagining the way biologists and all scientists interact with the technology layer of their research lab.
It has been a fast-paced and incredibly rewarding journey to build this company with my co-founder Max and the rest of the team over the past 3 years: We built our revolutionary Trilobot: a modular lab robot that auto-calibrates itself and can use a limitless variety of tools and deck instruments (among many other things); We developed the Trilobio OS research engine that allows you to design research through a no-code GUI and then determines and executes all the details; We deployed our platform at leading labs across the country; And now, with this funding, we are gearing up for the rapid deployment of our platform across the industry.
Now, with all that in mind, I’d love to share the history of how Trilobio came into existence and the experiences that shaped our vision for the future of biology.
A Passion for Biology
I distinctly remember reading about Jennifer Doudna’s discovery of CRISPR-Cas9. It shook the world. Suddenly, people were talking about how we could engineer organisms to create novel materials, develop cures for genetic diseases that cause immense suffering, and had the chance to usher in a new era of human health and well-being that had only been dreamed of in science fiction. Biology was the future, and I knew at that moment that I wanted to be a biologist.
However it is not easy for a 13 year old to build out a sterile lab environment, fill it with expensive equipment, and recruit a team of dedicated biologists. Undeterred, I began devising different ways to get into the field immediately. Ultimately, my master plan was to sneak my way onto a college research team by posing as a student. It actually worked! I worked as hard as I could for the team, in part to not give away myself as a stowaway, but also because I felt like I was living my dream.
I helped build biosensors by genetically engineering yeast to detect shellfish toxins in raw seafood and helped develop more affordable chemotherapies with bioreactors and GMO microbes. Of course, there were less glamorous aspects of the job. For instance, I spent countless hours on weekends caring for my cells, adjusting waterbaths, and counting colonies. The lab equipment wasn’t the best, but I was grateful just to be able to do work I was passionate about. This was my first experience in a lab, and it all seemed new to me and normal to everyone else. This was just biology research.
The Journey to Trilobio
Eventually, however, I was found out by the college administrators. Instead of giving up on my dream of doing biology research, I decided to build my own biology lab for high school students. I raised money via a crowdfunding campaign and purchased lab equipment for the first time. In short, I was disappointed. Most of the research equipment was expensive, excessively manual and hard to use. Pipetting was all done manually, changing the settings of a machine required reading through a 50 page user manual, and materials needed to be moved between devices by people. It seemed that doing cutting edge science didn’t necessarily come with cutting edge equipment. If we needed cells fed every 8 hours, I’d be in at 4AM to feed them. If I needed to move liquids around countless plates every day, then it was just what needed to be done at an upstart lab like mine. This didn’t feel like the advanced science we dreamed of, but all the biologists I knew were doing the same thing.
When I was admitted to Harvey Mudd College, I was excited. Surely, now I’d have advanced technologies to support the biologists pushing the frontiers of science. I started another lab with a larger budget, and was able to buy my first lab robot. To my disappointment, I immediately learned that it wasn’t meant to be used by someone like me (a biologist). Standard research had to be programmed with thousands of lines of Python. It took longer to complete research with a robot than to do it by hand, not to mention recalibrating and adjusting to support even minor changes based on new insights or curiosity (the foundation of scientific discovery). On top of it all, the robots were completely unreliable. They would break down and take my time and research materials with it. I noticed that instead of freeing up my time, I was spending more time on average using robots than if I just did my work manually.
Rebuilding the Biology Lab
After 10 years of genetic engineering, not only had the technology not changed much, it wasn’t even getting any easier, more productive, more reliable, or more affordable. My fellow scientists and I were running on the fumes of our dreams to cure blindness, genetic diseases, and help people live better lives. We were working on the cutting edge while our lab equipment was not.
I realized that the common denominator underlying all our frustrations was the technology layer of biology. Biologists conduct their research with technology, but even if the equipment didn’t work well, biologists had to put up with it to perform their work. Robots and other equipment continued to be sold to biologists even if they ended up not being up to the task and abandoned. Whereas there were advances in manufacturing, mechanical design, and computing, the foundational technology layer of biology research was standing still at best (and hindering research at worst). I saw extraordinary software and hardware built to support Mechanical and Electrical engineers, but not Biologists. We were being sold equipment that costs 10x what it should, and performed 1/10th of what we needed. And because there weren't innovative, reliable, affordable alternatives, there was no incentive to change.
From then on, I saw every action a biologist took differently. Now, every time I saw a biologist flip a tube over and over again, fill 96 well plates by hand to prep for the next assay, or manually move samples between lab devices I saw the potential to unlock millions of hours of time for biologists to make breakthroughs instead. I saw an opportunity to redefine the relationship between scientists and the technologies that power their work every single day, enabling new scientific heights to be reached.
The Trilobio Mission
That was when Max and I knew we had to start a company. I quit the research world altogether and founded Trilobio because I thought that we could do better, that lab equipment could be so much more than it was. It shouldn’t be something you need to put up with to accomplish your research, but instead it should be a super-power that lets you do hundreds of times more research than you would be able to without it. It can empower you to think more creatively, to solve harder problems, and work as fast as you can come up with groundbreaking ideas.
I’m proud to announce that Trilobio has raised $8M to build a new generation of lab equipment, which is designed to be fully automated from the ground up. We’re building robots designed to be used directly by biologists, and not require outside expertise to operate and maintain. We’re building whole lab automation to be affordable, since we believe that the entire lab of the future will be fully automated, and we want everyone to be able to participate in this future. We’re building a software stack which controls the lab to be flexible, scalable and intelligent. This will enable biologists to just tell the robots what they want, and trust that it will be executed correctly. We’re building tools to allow biologists to share protocols which work across many different lab configurations, so that we can collaborate more effectively.
At Trilobio, we’ve only just begun, and there’s a long way to go before we’re going to be able to match the true potential of biology with our tooling, but the results thus far are very promising. We’re building a future where every-day biologists without million dollar budgets will be able to control their fully-automated lab with a click of a button. We see this as an opportunity to empower biologists, tap into the true potential of the field, and power the next generation of biological breakthroughs.
If you believe that your lab equipment could be more than it is, please contact us. We’d love the opportunity to chat with you and show you what we’ve been building. We built the robotics and automation platform of our dreams. We love it and we know you will too.