Sacra estimates that Benchling hit $210M in annualized recurring revenue (ARR) in May 2024, up 27% year-over-year from $145M in 2022. The company announced surpassing the $200M ARR milestone in May.

Benchling's revenue growth has gradually moderated as the company has scaled, from 175% in 2019 to 100% in 2020, 82% in 2021, 45% in 2022 and a projected 27% for the full year 2024. However, growth in total customers has remained robust, expanding from 410 in 2020 to 1,200 as of May 2024.

Meanwhile, Benchling has steadily expanded average revenue per customer, from $125K in 2017-2018 to $175K as of May 2024. This 40% increase reflects strong net dollar retention as Benchling launches new products and increases cross-sell and upsell with existing customers.

As a pure SaaS business, Benchling likely has gross margins in the 60-70% range, lower than the typical 70-80%+ for SaaS due to a high mix of professional services revenue. In 2021, the company shared that services are attached to every deal, from a "couple hours" for startups up to 18-month engagements with large enterprises.

While Benchling doesn't disclose customer acquisition costs, their self-serve, bottom-up model likely results in very efficient CAC compared to traditional top-down enterprise sales. Benchling seeds the market by offering its product for free to academics, who then bring it with them to industry. These champions drive initial adoption and expansion in labs, while Benchling's sales team focuses on landing larger enterprise-wide contracts over time.

Benchling was valued at $6.1 billion as of 2024. The company has raised $412 million in total funding across 11 funding rounds. Key investors include Altimeter Capital, Tiger Global Management, and Benchmark. The company's most recent round was a Series F, which included participation from Franklin Venture Partners and Lone Pine Capital. Other notable investors across previous rounds include ICONIQ Capital, Lux Capital, and Thrive Capital.

Benchling was founded in 2012 in San Francisco, California by Sajith Wickramasekara and Ashu Singhal, with the mission to accelerate life sciences research and unlock the power of biotechnology.

The cornerstone of Benchling's offering is the Benchling R&D Cloud, a comprehensive suite of software tools designed to streamline and optimize the entire biotech R&D lifecycle, from early research to development and manufacturing.

The Benchling platform is designed to address the key challenges faced by modern biotech R&D, including (1) experiment design and documentation, (2) sample tracking and management, (3) workflow orchestration and collaboration, and (4) data capture, analysis, and visualization

By providing a centralized, cloud-based platform for all R&D activities, Benchling enables organizations to improve efficiency, enhance reproducibility, and accelerate innovation.

Benchling's platform consists of several core modules, each designed to support a specific aspect of the R&D process:

Notebook: A digital lab notebook that automatically captures experiment context, protocols, and results. Notebook supports rich media attachments, templated entries, and bi-directional links to samples and sequence data.

Molecular Biology: A suite of tools for designing, analyzing, and sharing DNA and amino acid sequences. Includes a sequence editor, alignment viewer, primer designer, and molecular cloning tools.

Registry: A flexible, hierarchical database for standardizing, tracking, and querying biological entities like plasmids, cell lines, antibodies, and more. Supports custom schemas, advanced search, and role-based access control.

Inventory: Tracks the storage, quantity, and usage of physical lab materials across multiple locations. Enables scientists to quickly locate samples, monitor stock levels, and streamline ordering.

Workflows: Connects tasks, samples, and data across teams to orchestrate complex R&D processes. Includes customizable task templates, automated hand-offs, and real-time dashboards and reports.

Benchling Insights sits atop the core platform, providing powerful analytics and visualization capabilities to support data-driven decision making. Insights enables users to track key metrics, identify trends and outliers, and compare results across experiments and projects.

More recently, Benchling has begun leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to further enhance its platform capabilities with predictive modeling to optimize experiment design and resource allocation, natural language processing to automate data entry and extraction from unstructured notes, and computer vision to analyze images and detect patterns in biological assays

By embedding AI into its platform, Benchling aims to not only improve R&D efficiency, but also to enable new types of scientific insights and discoveries.

To support customers in regulated industries, Benchling offers a Validated Cloud product that enables compliance with GxP requirements (e.g., GMP, GLP, GCP). Validated Cloud includes features like audit trails, electronic signatures, and validation packages to streamline regulatory compliance.

With Validated Cloud, Benchling customers can use a single platform from early research through preclinical, clinical, and manufacturing phases, reducing technology transfer costs and risks.

Benchling's business model revolves around its core SaaS platform, the Benchling R&D Cloud, which provides a suite of tools for experiment design, documentation, sample tracking, and data management.

Customers pay a recurring subscription fee to access Benchling's platform, which is priced on a per-user basis. This SaaS model provides Benchling with a predictable and scalable revenue stream.

Beyond the core platform, Benchling has built an ecosystem of add-on modules and integrations that serve as cross-sells and upsells. For example, a customer using Benchling's Notebook for experiment documentation might be upsold the Molecular Biology module for DNA sequence design, or the Workflow module for process orchestration.

This modular approach allows customers to start with a specific use case and then expand their usage of Benchling over time, driving increased revenue per customer. It also creates a stickier product experience, as customers become more embedded in the Benchling ecosystem.

Benchling employs a product-led growth (PLG) go-to-market strategy, where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

Benchling offers a free tier of its product for individual academic researchers. This allows Benchling to seed its product among future industry leaders, who then bring Benchling with them as they move into industry roles.

As these users grow in their careers and their organizations' needs expand, Benchling is well-positioned to convert them into paid customers and expand within the organization. This bottom-up, user-led growth model results in very efficient customer acquisition compared to traditional top-down enterprise sales.

Benchling's PLG strategy is supported by a self-serve product experience, with in-app guides, templates, and resources that allow users to get started and see value quickly without relying on sales or support.

For its paid tiers, Benchling employs a usage-based pricing model, where customers pay based on the number of users and the specific modules they need.

This pricing model aligns Benchling's success with that of its customers - as customers grow and add more users, Benchling benefits from increased revenue. It also provides customers with flexibility to start small and scale their usage over time, without large upfront commitments.

Benchling's pricing tiers are designed to accommodate the needs of different customer segments, from startups to large enterprises. Startup plans start at around $15,000 per year, while enterprise plans can reach $1 million or more for the largest customers.

In addition to subscription fees, Benchling also generates revenue from professional services, which are often bundled with enterprise contracts. These services can include onboarding, data migration, custom development, and training, and help ensure customers are successful with the platform.

Expansion within existing accounts is a key growth driver for Benchling. The company has achieved a best-in-class net dollar retention rate of over 150%, indicating that existing customers are consistently increasing their spending over time.

Benchling drives this expansion through a combination of user growth within accounts (i.e., adding more seats) and upselling additional modules and capabilities.

For example, a customer may start with just the Notebook module for a small team, but over time expand to the full Benchling platform across their entire R&D organization. Or a customer may initially use Benchling for early research, but then adopt the Validated Cloud product as they move into regulated development and manufacturing.

To support this expansion motion, Benchling has a dedicated customer success team that works closely with customers to identify new use cases, drive adoption, and ensure customers are deriving maximum value from the platform. The company also invests heavily in R&D to continually enhance the platform's capabilities and release new modules that create upsell opportunities.