CUTISS AG

Touting its mission to revolutionize R&D by bringing drug development into the cloud, Benchling has earned its unicorn horn from investors hungry for something new. A new round of financing will now drive that eye-popping valuation even higher. Just seven months after raising $200 million from investors in a Series E, valuing the R&D cloud software developer at just over $4 billion in April, Benchling raised $100 million in a Series F round, valuing the company at a tidy $6.1 billion. And this doesn’t take into consideration that Benchling was worth under $1 billion last April, according to Forbes — just after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the world stage. The round was co-led by US investment firm Franklin Templeton — a new investor into Benchling alongside existing investor Altimeter Capital. New investors Tiger Global and Lone Pine Capital joined in on the action, as well as existing investors. Benchling will use the funding to continue investing in product development and global expansion, the company said in a statement yesterday, and specifically focus on expanding its presence in Europe, the Middle East and Africa after announcing in January that it opened its EMEA headquarters in Zurich. Her’e a brief recap of the company’s financing rounds: Since announcing the Series E raise, Benchling has expanded — now including support for early-stage drug development and RNA therapeutics, adding new people to its C-suite and adding European businesses to its clientele, including Cutiss AG, Sanofi, Selexis SA, and Syngenta. Some of Benchling’s other high-profile clients include Gilead, Regeneron and Eli Lilly, according to Bloomberg. And according to Benchling’s co-founder and CEO Sajith Wickramasekara, Benchling plans to expand even more. “With this new investment, we’ll continue growing our teams and customer base in the US and Europe,” Wickramasekara said in a statement. “We’ll also keep broadening our platform’s capabilities to support our customers’ full product lifecycle, from research through to development and manufacturing.”