Benchling's 150%+ Net Retention

A net dollar retention rate above 150% means Benchling is not just keeping accounts, it is turning each initial lab foothold into a much larger software footprint over time. That pattern fits a product sold into scientific teams that start with one workflow, then add more scientists, more samples, and more modules like Registry, Molecular Biology, and Bioprocess as programs move from discovery into development. Average revenue per customer rose from about $125K in 2017 to 2018 to $175K by May 2024, which shows this expansion is visible in account size, not just logo count.

• Benchling lands in day to day lab work. Scientists write experiments in notebooks, register plasmids and cell lines in Registry, and track process steps in Bioprocess. Once those records become the system of record, adding adjacent teams and workflows is much easier than ripping the software out.
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• The expansion motion is helped by a bottom up entry point and a top down enterprise sale. Benchling seeded usage in academia and smaller teams, then increasingly sold broader deployments to large biopharma. In 2021, 43% of new revenue came from the top 50 biopharmas, up from 23% in 2019.
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• In software, 150%+ retention is rare and usually marks a product with strong cross sell and workflow depth. Benchling also now serves over 1,300 biotech companies, which suggests the same land and expand playbook has been repeated across a wide customer base rather than a few outsized accounts.
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The next leg of growth is turning Benchling from a digital lab notebook into the operating layer for more of life sciences R&D. As Benchling adds more structured workflows, integrations, and AI driven products on top of the same underlying scientific data, the easiest revenue to win should keep coming from selling more surface area into customers that are already on the platform.