Opentrons Labworks raised $40 million in Series E funding announced October 30, money the New York lab robotics company says will fund autonomous science systems where AI models and lab robots design, run and refine experiments in a continuous loop without a human restarting each step.
Healthcare investor Avego led the round, with BroadOak Capital Partners also participating. Opentrons says it already has more than 11,000 robots deployed across 80-plus countries and sits inside 90% of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies, positioning the ten-year-old company as the default execution layer connecting AI models to physical lab work rather than a newcomer trying to break in.
"Millions of scientists spend much of their day on manual work a robot can do. Giving that time back to discovery is the biggest opportunity in science," Opentrons CEO James Atwood said, according to Robotics and Automation News.
Why lab robots matter to the AI boom
Every large language model claim about AI accelerating drug discovery eventually runs into the same bottleneck: a hypothesis still has to be tested in a physical lab with pipettes, plates and incubators. Opentrons' pitch is that its open, API-driven robotics platform is the layer that lets an AI model's output turn into an actual pipetted experiment, rather than sitting as an unverified prediction. Avego managing partner James Flexner made that case directly, saying "every AI-driven discovery still has to be tested in a real lab" and that the market is converging around Opentrons' platform.
A crowded but growing field
Opentrons isn't alone chasing this thesis. UK-based Automata raised $45 million in February, and Multiply Labs secured $75 million in October to expand robotic biomanufacturing, putting at least three well-funded players racing to automate the same wet-lab bottleneck inside a single year. What differentiates Opentrons is scale and incumbency: its installed base across 11,000 robots gives it existing customer relationships that newer entrants still have to build from scratch.
The Series E proceeds will go toward expanding automation capabilities, faster protocol development, deeper integration across lab systems, and entry into new markets. Opentrons hasn't specified a target robot count or revenue figure tied to the raise, so the next marker to watch is whether its installed base — and the pharma penetration rate it's built its pitch on — grows meaningfully over the next year.