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 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.

Benchling's primary competition comes from legacy software providers in the life sciences R&D space, such as Dassault Systèmes (Medidata), Thermo Fisher Scientific, and PerkinElmer.

These established players benefit from long-standing customer relationships, deep domain expertise, and broad portfolios of products and services. They have also been aggressive in acquiring emerging competitors to defend their market position.

For instance, Dassault Systèmes acquired Medidata, a leading clinical trial software provider, for $5.8 billion in 2019. Thermo Fisher Scientific has made numerous acquisitions in the informatics space, including Core Informatics in 2017.

However, these legacy players are often hampered by outdated technology architectures, complex on-premise deployments, and a lack of flexibility to adapt to the rapidly evolving needs of modern biotech R&D.

Their products tend to be more rigid and modular, lacking the seamless integration and collaboration capabilities that Benchling offers through its cloud-native platform.

Benchling also faces competition from a new wave of startups that are similarly leveraging cloud software and modern user experiences to transform life sciences R&D.

Notable competitors in this category include:

These startups are validating the market demand for next-generation R&D software and putting pressure on Benchling to continually innovate.

However, Benchling has established a strong brand and market position, particularly among the emerging biotech companies that are driving much of the industry's innovation. Benchling's focus on the early research and discovery phase has allowed it to establish a beachhead from which to expand into later-stage development and manufacturing.

Furthermore, Benchling's platform approach, with its integrated suite of applications and robust APIs, creates a high degree of stickiness and switching costs once customers are adopted.

At a more granular level, Benchling competes with a variety of point solutions for specific R&D workflows, particularly in the Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) space.

Competitors here include:

While these solutions may offer comparable or even superior functionality for specific use cases, they lack the breadth and integration of Benchling's platform.

Benchling's ability to provide a unified data foundation across the entire R&D lifecycle is a key differentiator. By capturing data at the point of experimentation and making it easily accessible and reusable downstream, Benchling enables a stepwise change in R&D efficiency and insight generation.

Finally, a significant portion of the market is still served by custom in-house software solutions, particularly among larger pharmaceutical companies.

These in-house systems are often deeply embedded in legacy workflows and can be challenging to replace due to data migration and change management challenges.

However, the rapid pace of technological change, coupled with the increasing complexity of biotech R&D, is making it harder for in-house IT teams to keep up. Many organizations are recognizing the benefits of partnering with a dedicated software vendor like Benchling that can provide a constantly evolving, state-of-the-art platform.

Benchling's Validated Cloud offering, which supports GxP compliance, is particularly compelling for organizations looking to migrate from in-house systems to a more flexible and maintainable commercial platform.

The rapid advancements in biotechnology over the past decade have set the stage for a major transformation of the global economy. Just as the industrial revolution reshaped society in the 19th century and the digital revolution did so in the 20th, the bioeconomy is poised to be the defining paradigm of the 21st century.

The potential applications of biotechnology are vast, spanning sectors as diverse as healthcare, agriculture, energy, materials science, and consumer goods. McKinsey estimates that by 2040, up to 60% of the physical inputs to the global economy could be produced biologically.

This represents a massive market opportunity for companies like Benchling that provide the critical infrastructure for biotech R&D. As more industries seek to harness the power of biology to drive innovation and sustainability, the demand for modern R&D tools will grow exponentially.

Historically, life sciences R&D has been a largely manual and siloed process, with data scattered across disparate systems and formats. This has hindered productivity, reproducibility, and collaboration, slowing the pace of scientific discovery.

However, the industry is now undergoing a digital transformation, driven by the convergence of cloud computing, automation, and artificial intelligence. This shift is creating a new market for software platforms that can streamline R&D workflows, enable data-driven decision making, and accelerate time to market.

Benchling is at the forefront of this trend, providing a comprehensive platform that addresses the key pain points in modern biotech R&D. As more organizations recognize the value of digitizing their R&D operations, Benchling's addressable market will continue to expand.

Synthetic biology, the engineering of biological systems for specific purposes, is one of the fastest-growing areas of biotechnology. By treating biology as a programmable system, synthetic biology enables the rapid design, construction, and testing of novel biological entities.

This field has immense potential to transform industries ranging from medicine to materials to energy. The global synthetic biology market is expected to reach $30.7 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 26.3%.

Benchling's platform is particularly well-suited to the needs of synthetic biology R&D. Its molecular biology tools, including a sequence designer and CRISPR guide RNA designer, enable researchers to efficiently design and construct complex biological systems.

As synthetic biology continues to mature and move from academic labs to commercial applications, Benchling is positioned to be the go-to platform for this emerging industry.

The pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a paradigm shift, moving from a focus on small molecule drugs to a new era of biologics and precision medicine.

This shift is driven by the recognition that the one-size-fits-all approach to drug development is insufficient to address the complexity of human biology. The future of medicine lies in targeted therapies that are tailored to an individual's genetic profile.

This personalized approach to medicine requires a fundamentally different R&D process, one that is more data-intensive, collaborative, and iterative. Benchling's platform is designed to support this new paradigm, enabling biopharma companies to efficiently manage the complex data and workflows associated with biologics R&D.

As biopharma companies increasingly adopt Benchling's platform across their research, development, and manufacturing operations, Benchling's addressable market within this sector will continue to grow.

While Benchling's initial focus has been on biotech R&D, its platform has the potential to expand into adjacent industries that also rely on complex scientific workflows.

For example, Benchling's solutions could be adapted to support R&D in areas such as materials science, chemical engineering, and nanotechnology. These industries share many of the same challenges around data management, process optimization, and collaboration that Benchling addresses in the biotech space.

By leveraging its core technology and domain expertise, Benchling could tap into these new markets and significantly expand its total addressable market.