Earlier today TSFV portfolio company BenchSci announced that it raised US$22 million in Series B funding, bringing its total raised to US$45 million. F-Prime Capital, a private venture firm affiliated with Fidelity's founding Johnson family, led this latest funding round, with participation from Northleaf Capital Partners and existing investors, including Google’s Gradient Ventures, Inovia Capital, Golden Ventures, and Real Ventures.

Coinciding with the infusion of capital, BenchSci announced the launch of its new AI-assisted reagent selection product and expanded a contract with Novartis in a market it estimates is worth more than $10.2 billion per year. BenchSci’s marquee offering — an antibody selection service — employs machine learning to select antibodies in as little as 30 seconds (versus the 12 weeks antibody selection typically takes). It can potentially save billions of dollars for the industry by empowering scientists to run more successful experiments to accelerate drug discovery. 

How BenchSci grew so quick and built an incredibly defensible moat can be best explained through the “Network Effect = ASSET” framework. In the past few years, the BenchSci team has built a large network with a massive proprietary data set. It is great to see BenchSci’s evolution since TSFV invested almost 4 years ago. Can’t wait to see its next act unfold.