Opentrons Press Page

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 You may see OpenTrons or OpenTron out on the internet, but those are outdated.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!

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RECENT: BIOTECH

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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

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