Emerald Cloud Lab

Last updated
Emerald Cloud Lab
Type Private
PredecessorEmerald Therapeutics
Founded2010;13 years ago (2010)
Founder
  • D.J. Kleinbaum
  • Brian Frezza
Headquarters
South San Francisco, California
,
United States
Website emeraldcloudlab.com

Emerald Cloud Lab (ECL) is a privately-owned biotech startup. The company focuses on advancing laboratory virtualization, for chemistry and biotechnology, by building the first fully functional cloud lab, allowing scientists to conduct all of their wet lab research without being in a physical laboratory. [1]

Contents

Products and services

ECL is a physical laboratory that can be accessed remotely by scientists via the internet. Scientists ship samples to an ECL facility and design their experiments in the ECL Command Center software application. ECL Command Center is a fully integrated application, where experiments are encoded in a language and grammar designed by ECL to allow remote operation and ensure reproducibility. ECL remotely conducts your experiments in a highly automated ECL facility exactly to the scientist’s specifications. The platform collects and organizes all data generated by and relevant to experiments into a powerful knowledge graph. ECL Command Center’s extensive suite of tools can then be used to plot, analyze, and visualize results. [2]

History

Founding

D.J. Kleinbaum and Brian Frezza grew up together on Emerald Drive outside of Philadelphia. In 2010, after completing their PhDs, they came together to found Emerald Therapeutics in an effort to develop "antiviral therapeutics for diseases such as HPV and HIV". During this time, they experienced frustrations with laboratory hardware and software. Hardware often comes from disparate manufacturers, software is often rudimentary, and output can vary in formatting. To simplify laboratory testing, the group wrote centralized management software for the different machines and a database to store all metadata and results. [3] This "laboratory operating system" continued to expand in capabilities, including the ability to directly control instrumentation and manage inventory and procurement. Recognizing the value this type of system presented outside of their own development goals, Kleinbaum and Frezza launched this service in 2014 under the name Emerald Cloud Lab. [4] In 2016, Emerald Cloud Lab and Emerald Therapeutics were spun off from one another, and both are independent corporations. [5] [6]

Business development

As of 2014, Emerald Cloud Lab offered access to 40 types of laboratory instruments. [3] By 2017, the range of instruments had expanded to 106. [7] As of July 2020, Emerald Cloud Lab offered full control of over 150 laboratory instruments, with plans to expand capabilities outlined through 2021. [2]

Researchers and pharmaceutical groups have long been concerned about the lack of reproducibility of laboratory testing in the biomedical field. A 2017 literature analysis article posited that highly automated, internet connected labs like ECL could ameliorate the problem. The paper concludes that, "we believe that robotic labs can provide the basis for performing a large percentage of basic biomedical research in a reproducible and transparent fashion". [8] Frezza has described this laboratory inconsistency as one specific reason for the development of Emerald Cloud Lab and the use of automation. [9]

Financing

After spinning out of Emerald Therapeutics, the company has gone on to raise capital in multiple rounds. Key investors include Founders Fund, [10] Schooner Capital, [11] OS Fund, [12] Alcazar Capital, [13] Western Technology Investment, [14] Sound Ventures, [15] SciFi VC, [16] Incite Ventures, [17] and Spike Ventures. [13]

The business got its second round of funding by 2014 from the Founders Fund (FF), a venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel, bringing total funding raised from FF up to $13.5 million. [3] The first FF funding round was not public. [4]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laboratory automation</span>

Laboratory automation is a multi-disciplinary strategy to research, develop, optimize and capitalize on technologies in the laboratory that enable new and improved processes. Laboratory automation professionals are academic, commercial and government researchers, scientists and engineers who conduct research and develop new technologies to increase productivity, elevate experimental data quality, reduce lab process cycle times, or enable experimentation that otherwise would be impossible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tech Coast Angels</span> American venture capital firm

Tech Coast Angels is the leading source of funding to early-stage companies in Southern California. TCA has over 450 members and is also one of the largest angel networks in the world. An analysis by CB Insights ranked TCA No.1 out of 370 angel groups on “Network Centrality” and No. 5 overall in “Investor Mosaic.”

CloudShare is a cloud computing provider founded in 2007 in Israel. It is now headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerusalem Venture Partners</span> International venture capital firm

Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) is an international venture capital firm founded in 1993. The fund specializes in investments in startup companies, focusing on digital media, enterprise software, semiconductors, data storage and cyber security, having raised close to $1.4 billion USD across nine funds. JVP is headquartered in Margalit Startup City Jerusalem with offices in Be'er Sheva, New York City and Paris.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">New Enterprise Associates</span> American Venture Capital firm

New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the world's largest venture capital firms.

Atlas Venture is an early-stage venture capital firm that creates and invests in biotechnology startup companies in the U.S. Atlas is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the majority of its investments are located. Atlas raised its thirteenth fund totaling $450 million in March 2022, after raising its Opportunity Fund II totaling $300 million in September 2021.

DynamicOps was an American private software company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts which developed cloud automation and management solutions. It was acquired by VMware in 2012.

Science Exchange is a cloud-based software company offering an R&D marketplace to buy and sell scientific services. The marketplace gives life sciences companies access to the outsourced research they need and the platform fully automates R&D outsourcing from source to pay. Commercial contract research organizations (CROs) and academic core facilities can sell their products and services directly through the marketplace.

Ghost Management Group, LLC is a technology company based in Irvine, California. that has a portfolio of advertising, web, point of sale and logistics software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brian Singerman</span>

Brian Singerman is a partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with over $11 billion under management.

Madrona Venture Group is an American venture capital firm, founded in 1995 and based in Seattle, Washington. Madrona specializes in seed, startup, Series A and early stage investments.

Sapphire Ventures is a venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Austin, and London. The firm is considered one of the world's premier venture capital firms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pitango</span> Israeli venture capital fund

Pitango VC, established in 1993, is Israel's largest venture capital fund with over $2.8 billion under management. Pitango VC invests through three dedicated funds, Pitango First, Pitango HealthTech, and Pitango Growth. Pitango invests in startups around the world, in domains such as Vertical SaaS, Digital Health, Deep Tech, FinTech & InsureTech, Devops, Generative AI, Web3, and FoodTech.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Almaz Capital</span> International venture fund

Almaz Capital is a global VC fund headquartered in Portola Valley, California, United States investing in early stage, capital efficient technology companies in high-growth sectors. Almaz Capital focuses on disruptive deep tech companies in b2b software space, including AI/ML and Blockchain applications, IoT and Edge Computing Enablers, Cybersecurity, etc. Since its foundation the firm's portfolio has included about 50 companies, with more than 300 million US dollars invested in them.

The Samsung Catalyst Fund (SCF) is the evergreen venture capital fund of Samsung Electronics. The fund invests in deep technology, artificial intelligence and big data startups. The fund's headquarters are located in San Jose, California, with offices in Seoul, Tel Aviv, and Paris.

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering is a cross-disciplinary research institute at Harvard University focused on bridging the gap between academia and industry by drawing inspiration from nature's design principles to solve challenges in health care and the environment. It is focused on the field of biologically inspired engineering to be distinct from bioengineering and biomedical engineering. The institute also has a focus on applications, intellectual property generation, and commercialization. The Wyss Institute is located in Boston's Longwood Medical Area and has 375 full-time staff. The Wyss is organized around eight focus areas, each of which integrate faculty, postdocs, fellows, and staff scientists. The focus areas are bioinspired therapeutics & diagnostics, diagnostics accelerator, immuno-materials, living cellular devices, molecular robotics, 3D organ engineering, predictive bioanalytics and synthetic biology.

A cloud laboratory is a heavily automated, centralized research laboratory where scientists can run an experiment from a computer in a remote location. Cloud laboratories offer the execution of life science research experiments as a service, allowing researchers to retain full control over experimental design. Users create experimental protocols through a high-level API and the experiment is executed in the cloud laboratory, with no need for the user to be involved.

References

  1. ↑ Mouratidis, Yiannis. "A Cloud Lab Dedicated To Cancer Drug Discovery". Forbes. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  2. 1 2 "How the ECL Works". www.emeraldcloudlab.com. Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  3. 1 2 3 Vance, Ashlee (3 July 2014). "Emerald Therapeutics: Biotech Lab for Hire". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 5 July 2017. Retrieved 30 October 2019.
  4. 1 2 Temple, James (30 June 2014). "Founders Fund Backs a Robotic Lab that Puts Science in the Cloud". Vox. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
  5. ↑ Emerald Cloud Lab, Inc., California Corporation Entity Number C3251573. See "Amended Statement by Foreign Corporation" (PDF). California Secretary of State. November 10, 2016. Retrieved July 30, 2020.
  6. ↑ "Emerald Cloud Lab - Biocom" . Retrieved 2020-07-29.
  7. ↑ Groth, Paul; Cox, Jessica (2017), “Datasets for Potential of Robotic Lab Methods Usage in Biomedical Papers”, Mendeley Data, v3 http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/gy7bfzcgyd.3#file-2066813b-adc9-425e-a347-51122bdbe944
  8. ↑ Groth, P.; Cox, J. (2017). "Indicators for the use of robotic labs in basic biomedical research: A literature analysis". PeerJ. 5: e3997. doi: 10.7717/peerj.3997 . PMC   5681851 . PMID   29134146.
  9. ↑ Garner, Rochelle. "Science labs in the cloud: Champagne discoveries, beer budget". Cnet. Archived from the original on 28 October 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2019.
  10. ↑ "Emerald Cloud Lab". Founders Fund. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  11. ↑ "Portfolio". SCHOONER CAPITAL. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  12. ↑ "Portfolio Companies". OS Fund. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  13. 1 2 "AVG Focused Fund Portfolio of Investments". Alumni Ventures Group. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  14. ↑ "Portfolio". WTI. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  15. ↑ PhD, @Marina T. Alamanou (2019-10-07). "Artificial Intelligence in Preclinical Design and Execution: Investors and Startups". Medium. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  16. ↑ "SciFi VC". scifi.vc. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
  17. ↑ Incite. "Ventures". Incite. Retrieved 2020-07-31.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.