Copenhagen-based Reshape Biotech, a company that builds lab robots to automate the everyday tasks of microbiologists, announced on Thursday, February 9, that it has raised $8.1M (nearly €7.55M) in Denmark’s largest-ever Seed funding round.
The Danish startup says it will use the funds to expand its product offerings and team.
Currently, Reshape distributes its equipment across Europe and the US. In the near future, it plans to open a location in North America and expand development, application science and sales efforts to scale its robotic fleet by 100x.
Reshape Biotech was a member of the Y Combinator 2021 cohort.
Investors of this round
The oversubscribed funding round was led by ACME Capital, with participation from FundersClub, Y Combinator, Unity co-founder Nicholas Francis, and Per Falholt.
With this investment, Christian Tang-Jespersen, partner at ACME Capital,, has joined Reshape’s Board of Directors.
Tang-Jespersen says, “Digitising laborious processes in R&D for food and biotech industries can lead to healthier societies for people and our planet. Reshape challenges the status quo of the last century of microbiology experimentation with a cost-efficient product that allows for much higher volume experiments, more meaningful data points and faster results.”
Building next-gen lab automation robots
Founded in 2018 by Carl-Emil Grøn Christensen, Magnus Madsen and Daniel Storgaard, Reshape Biotech enables businesses to digitise microbiological tests and remotely collaborate on a worldwide scale.
According to Reshape, lab automation has often been expensive and challenging to adopt. By utilising systems engineering, mechatronics, cloud computing, machine-learning based data analysis, and a thorough grasp of biotech applications, the company is able to provide robotic instruments at an affordable price.
CEO Carl-Emil Grøn says, “Biotech is the most important industry of the 21st century. For it to flourish in the future, we have to make the discovery process more accessible and affordable. Automation at scale is critical to making that a reality.”
“We are ‘reshaping’ manual processes that have remained largely unchanged over the last 100 years. Our technology is helping R&D labs troubleshoot in real-time with production sites located tens of thousand miles away and letting researchers check results from home, allowing remote work to prosper in lab environments,” adds Grøn.
Reshape’s robots are vertically integrated across hardware, software, and microbiology to correctly acquire data while removing duplicate procedures. The startup claims to give scientists and professionals the tools they need to do research 1,000 times faster than it is done now.
Currently, Reshape provides services to 20 clients, including researchers, scientists, lab technicians, and CXOs involved in the creation of ingredients, industrial biotech, agricultural and food microbiology, and other fields.
In a statement, the company mentions that its technology and service have resulted in 100 per cent customer retention and 300 per cent Y-o-Y growth. Since 2021, Reshape has grown its robotic fleet from one to 110, experienced 10X revenue growth, and facilitated groundbreaking scientific breakthroughs.
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