It’s official, our first deal is complete. For some time we’ve been tracking Scispot as they prepared to raise their pre-seed round. We are incredibly excited to be backing Guru and Satya who you will become more familiar with as part of the BW portfolio.
A Quick Background:
Three years ago, before embarking on Scispot, Satya was immersed in developing ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools and algorithms, analyzing two billion data points daily to optimize cost-per-click models for Hotels.com. Simultaneously, Guru was building a growth engine for a life sciences tech company, specifically working with Big Pharma and biotech labs on their data engineering challenges. Their unique combination of passion and expertise clearly positioned them to revolutionize the handling and interpretation of biotech data.
In the biotech field, the ETL layer is often the least desired task due to its tedious and complex nature. It is commonly perceived as the most "boring" problem in the industry: managing and analyzing biotech R&D data. At Breakwater, we like highly fragmented and “boring” businesses.
As we talked through the problem internally and later consulted outside experts, it became abundantly clear to us that the data ecosystem for science was broken. Information (data) from a multitude of sources, including devices, wet laboratories, contract research organizations (CROs), and computational laboratory processes was dispersed and disorganized. This fragmentation made it extremely challenging to extract any valuable insights. Compounding the problem is current tech stacks in biotech don't afford the user the flexibility necessary to fully utilize their data.
Meet Scispot:
Scispot is an AI toolkit for stitching and transforming R&D data. Without the need to code, researchers and scientists can become their own computational biologists. Think of it as a super combo of ELN + LIMS + Integrations + Analytics. You can set it up using a user-friendly interface (GUI) or by entering commands (CLI). It enables the integration of disparate data and prepares it for machine learning, visualization, and auditing. Scispot accomplishes this by providing a lakehouse (data lake) specifically designed for Biotech applications and pairs that with Scispot GLUE. GLUE is a Data Cloud Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution that revolutionizes data integration and lab interoperability. The platform modernizes scientific data management, allowing researchers to seamlessly navigate through complex datasets, perform sophisticated analyses, and extract valuable insights.
Think of Scispot as a combination of Snowflake and Zapier designed for handling scientific R&D data, transforming every biotech company into a powerful AI hub.
About the Market:
- 80% of biotech R&D data is hidden and disconnected, spread across unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data in disparate locations, meaning it never gets used
- 80% of data is not ready for ML and AI models/pipelines
- 85% of biotechs have siloed data
- By 2025 the volume and complexity of biotech data will surpass astronomical data
- America’s Biopharma R&D consumes $100B every year
- McKinsey: Within two decades 60% of physical goods (currently ~5%) will be biologically manufactured
- $16.5B TAM by 2030
Doing More with Moore: Biotech’s Moment | Andreessen Horowitz (feat. Scispot)
The opportunity is massive, the ecosystem is well underserved, and Scispot is growing quickly. Product market fit is strong, and evidenced by the team closing 10 customers in the last 10 weeks. We are truly excited about this first deal and look forward to sharing more about the investment over time.
Lastly, we are incredibly thankful to the individuals that helped us with this deal. Specifically, Thomas Neumann from NortisBio and the first hand insight he was able to share about his own challenges with data and the need for Scispot. Additionally, we would like to thank Avi Belur for giving the BW Team an amazing letter of recommendation to help us secure our spot in the oversubscribed round. We join a fantastic set of supporters to Scispot including Nvidia, Y-Combinator, Axial VC, Mars, and Creative Destruction Lab.
