About Us
Our Mission
We make open source, flexible, user-friendly robots for life scientists. Our mission is to provide the scientific community with a common platform to easily share protocols and reproduce each other's results. Our robots automate experiments that would otherwise be done by hand, allowing them to spend more time pursuing answers to some of the 21st century’s most important questions.
FYI - our company name is Opentrons. You may see OpenTrons or OpenTron out on the internet, but those are outdated. Please just call us “Opentrons.” Thank you!
Opentrons Media Kit Zip Download
Contact us
press@opentrons.com
In The Media
FEATURED
- How This Startup Is Using Lab Automation To Transform Life Sciences And Healthcare
- SoftBank Invests in Robotics Company Behind NYC Covid Testing
- Opentrons Announces $200 Million Series C Round Led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2
- An Open-Source Framework for Automated High-Throughput Cell Biology Experiments
RECENT: COVID-19
- How the Coronavirus Variants Are Spreading in New York City
- New York City High Schools Reopen After Some Have Been Closed For More Than A Year
- What the Coronavirus Variants Mean for the End of the Pandemic
- Inside NYC's COVID Lab
- Governor Cuomo Announces Single-Day COVID-19 Positivity Rate Drops Below 3 Percent for First Time Since November 23
- Pandemic Response Lab (PRL) Discovers First COVID-19 Variant from South Africa in New York State Citizen
- NYC to scale up COVID variant screening amid silent spread
- New York City Barely Tests for Virus Variants. Can That Change?
- Hunt For Covid-19 Variants Looks To Ramp Up In New York Labs
- Temple, Penn Ramp Up COVID-19 Testing As Students Return To Campus
- City’s Own COVID-19 Testing Lab Hailed As A Success
- Photos: A Look Inside NYC's Biggest COVID-19 Lab
- Coronavirus Update New York City: NYC Pandemic Response Lab is home to researchers, analysts, technologists
- Opentrons Introduces Innovative, Low-Cost Wet Lab Filtration Module
- Pakistan’s First Automated COVID-19 Testing Lab Opens
RECENT: BIOTECH
- Life Sciences Firm Opentrons Takes 48K SF in Long Island City
- Unexpected Biotech
- The Future of Life Sciences is Laboratory Automation
- Simplifying Lab Tasks with Automated Liquid Handling
PREVIOUS COVERAGE
- USC To Export ‘Game Changer’ COVID-19 Tests To Clemson And Other SC Colleges
- Coronavirus News: NYC's Pandemic Response Lab making strides for residents
- A New NYC Covid Lab Aims To Process 20,000 Tests Daily
- New York City Opens Own Coronavirus Testing Lab To Increase Efficiency
- N.Y.C. Is Opening Its Own Virus Testing Lab to Address Shortages
- OpenCell Partners with King’s College and Opentrons To Create Affordable Shipping Container COVID-19 Testing Lab
- The Rogue Experimenters
- Leveraging open hardware to alleviate the burden of COVID-19 on global health systems
- Opentrons Partners With Zymo Research To Offer an Affordable, Automated COVID-19 Testing Platform
- La increíble historia de los 5 amigos que han traído a España los robots antiCovid-19
- Electrical Engineering CTU Faculty Help Automate Coronavirus Testing at Motol University Hospital
- OU Researchers, students continue exploration of improved COVID-19 testing methods
- YC Companies Responding to COVID-19 SOSV startups on the front line against the Coronavirus
- 7 open hardware projects working to solve COVID-19
- Is it high time for high-throughput experimentation?
- Help OpenCell Increase CoVid-19 testing capacity to >10K/day
- Opening Up the World of Automation with Opentrons: The Evolution of Automation Adoption in Biology
- Opentrons Labworks and Swift Bioscience Launch "Plug-Play" NGS Library Preparation Automation Workstation
- Is California’s Salad Bowl the next Silicon Valley?
- 10 Emerging Tech Platforms Building Tomorrow’s Breakthroughs
- How Biotech Startup Funding Will Change In The Next 10 Years
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Innovation in DIY Biology
- Arcis, Opentrons Sign Sample Prep Product Distribution Deal
- A DIY Approach To Automating Your Lab
- Winning iGEM Team Uses Opentrons To Create A 3x Faster Chassis For Genetic Engineering
- SynBioBetaLive! Let A Thousand Foundries Bloom With Opentrons
- The Synbio Stack, Part 1
KICKSTARTER COVERAGE
- How A Biotech Robotics Startup Founded In A Community Hackerspace By A Leftist Activist Just Raised $10 Million
- Let A Thousand Foundries Bloom: Opentrons’ Lab Of The Future
- Opentrons Releases Next-Gen Lab Robot, Closes $10M Seed Funding Round
- A Cheap, Pipette-Wielding Robot Wants To Take Over The Boring Bits Of Research
- Opentrons Aims To Be The ‘PC’ Of Biotech Labs
- Opentrons Launches 2x Faster OT-One S Line of Personal Pipetting Robots
- Opentrons: Open-Source Rapid Prototyping For Biology
- This Robot Could Make Creating New Life Forms As Easy As Coding An App
- Advancing Biology With An Open-Source Robot
Press Releases
- Opentrons Announces $200 Million Series C Round Led By SoftBank
- Pandemic Response Lab (PRL) Announces Partnership With Ginkgo Bioworks To Provide COVID-19 “Pool Testing” Services For Schools Nationwide
- Pandemic Response Lab (PRL) & CIC Health Partner To Provide COVID-19 Testing For U.S. Schools
- Pandemic Response Lab (PRL) Launches 4 U.S. COVID-19 Testing Hubs To Get Children Back To School Safely, Affordably
- Pandemic Response Lab (PRL) Discovers First COVID-19 Variant from South Africa in New York State Citizen
- Pandemic Response Lab (PRL) Discovers First COVID-19 Variant from South Africa in New York State Citizen
- Opentrons Introduces Innovative, Low-Cost Wet Lab Filtration Module
- OpenCell Partners with King’s College and Opentrons To Create Affordable Shipping Container COVID-19 Testing Lab
- Opentrons Partners With Zymo Research To Offer an Affordable, Automated COVID-19 Testing Platform
- Opentrons Launches The World’s Most Affordable Fully Automated Thermocycler
- Opentrons Hack-A-Tron 2019
- Announcing the WINNERS of the 2019 Opentrons + iGEM Team Challenge!
- Announcing the 2019 Opentrons + iGEM Partnership
- Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Opentrons + iGEM Team Challenge!
- Opentrons & iGEM Partnership
- Opentrons Launches the World’s Most Affordable Liquid Handling Lab Robot
Media Quotes
Opentrons debunked the notion that lab automation is inherently complicated, expensive and dependent on proprietary technologies. The Opentrons OT-2 pipetting robot, for instance, costs about $5000 and uses an open-source API for plug-and-play simplicity. Developed in close cooperation with industry-leading “co-developers” including Dr. Geoff Baldwin of Imperial College London, Boston University’s DAMP Lab, and the BioBricks Foundation, the OT-2 easily handles repetitive liquid handling tasks. -- SynBioBeta
"We started as a DIY project," says Will Canine, co-founder of Opentrons... The company keeps the hardware and software for its robots open source. "That makes for a very DIY-friendly platform — enabling people to customize our technology to fit their own needs," he adds. -- Nature
Lab pipetting robots already existed. They were large finicky machines costing upwards of $100,000 and had complicated software and calibration issues... [Opentrons] found a sweet spot in the market. Few labs can afford high priced robots but [theirs] at $4,000 is a very cheap piece of equipment for a lab. It is a very desirable thing at low cost. It does not have all the bells and whistles of the large ones, but most folks don’t need that. -- Technical.ly Brooklyn
"The lean biotech startup is possible now." So says Vinod Khosla about OT-2, Opentrons’ lab robot. As Silicon Valley’s biggest name in green tech investing, he might know what he’s talking about. Khosla and other high-flying biotech investors are betting that Opentrons will bring affordable lab automation to any biologist for the first time in history. The OT-2 is the product of $10M in seed funding aimed at making personal lab robots a reality. -- SynBioBeta
The affordable new lab machine promises even small research teams the chance to automate their experiments. What it does: Basically, the most boring part of lab work. Created by Opentrons, OT-2 uses pre-written code, or custom code created by a researcher, to automatically perform experiments by measuring and moving liquids between containers. -- MIT Technology Review
Canine refers to these more expensive machines as ‘mainframe’ machines – or computers that existed before the PC came about... these older, more expensive machines require engineers to run them on the backend, but Canine says Opentrons is “democratizing the tools” that allow for sharing protocols. In other words, his $5,000 machine is controlled by your web browser and allows researchers to download protocols from the cloud to run experiments without the need for an engineer to create the code first. -- TechCrunch
Starting at $3,000, the same price as the previous line-up of robots, customers can now execute experiments at 2x the speed and cut the runtime of a protocol by 50%. For example, the robot can fill a 96 well-plate in less than 90 seconds. This substantial upgrade makes Opentrons a great, affordable alternative to manually pipetting by hand and frees up scientists’ time at the bench. -- SynBioBeta
Lab robots are nothing new in biotech. But they tend to be incredibly expensive machines based on proprietary tech and intended for a narrow market of professional users. The OpenTrons, by contrast, is open source, meaning anyone can copy, build, and modify the tech as they see fit. -- Wired
"We're at the beginning of the digitization and automation of biotech," says Ryan Bethencourt, who helps run Indie Bio, an arm of SOS Ventures, which backed OpenTrons through its HAXLR8TR hardware accelerator... "The beauty of OpenTrons is that it's built for researchers who don't want to program, who are used to modern and simple user interfaces." -- Wired