How AI Will Accelerate Breakthroughs in Biotechnology with Benchling CEO Sajith Wickramasekara

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Saji, the cofounder and CEO of Benchlin, the system of record for biotech r and d. Today, we talk about the state of AI and bio, Benchling's bet on AI agents to help scientists make better decisions, experiment faster, and deliver drugs more effectively, why drug programs are so expensive and fail so often, and how to build a culture of science and software together. Saji, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me, Sarah. Excited to be here. Okay. So for our general listener base, can you just give us an overview of what Benchling is and sort of the scale of the business today? Sure. So I'm one of the cofounders of Benchling. We make modern software for scientific progress. So I started the company about thirteen years ago. It's been been a long time. Oh my god. I know. So I'm a software engineer by background, but I worked in a biology lab. I I was, like, really interested in medicine, and coming from the world of software. And software developers have amazing tools for working on code and for for collaborating. And when I got to the the biology lab, I found that scientists had paper notebooks and spreadsheets that would sit on their desktops, and, like, it was terrible. And so it's really hard to work together, and I think that was really frustrating for me personally. And, you know, I thought a little bit naive at the time. I I thought, like, how hard would it be to build good tools for for scientists? And so I started working on benchling, which helps scientists design molecules, plan their experiments out, run those experiments in the lab, get the data, organize it, analyze it, and then share it with their colleagues. Today, we work with about 1,300 biotech and pharma companies, scientists at over 7,000 academic, institutions, universities all all around the world. And, our software powers, you know, household names like Moderna and Sanofi and Eli Lilly and and Regeneron, but also, like, cutting edge biotech startups, you know, the, you know, future AI biotechs like isomorphic labs and Xara and and and companies like that. So we get to we get to see the innovation happening across the entire biotech sector and then build software that helps power it. I'm super excited to, like, actually use that vantage point, ask you a bunch of questions about bio and the macro. But just so people who don't come from the domain can picture it a little bit better, I think, like, you know, I can picture, like, gene sequences. Sure. And, like, the assay, like, said yes or no. Like, what other types what is the data that's actually in venturing? I think what's really interesting for everyone to understand is, like, making a drug there's, like, 9,999 steps in making a drug after you come up with a molecule. So …