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Afternoon Brief · October 29th 2026
Opentrons raises $40 million to make its lab robots something AI can drive
Opentrons, which makes benchtop liquid-handling robots, raised a $40 million led by Avego with BroadOak Capital Partners. It says more than 11,000 of its robots are in labs in over 80 countries, including at 18 of the 20 largest drugmakers B.
The money goes to software and data infrastructure as much as hardware: Opentrons now sells its systems as "built for AI to run experiments directly." Cheap, standardized lab robots are the missing half of the AI-for-science programs the labs keep announcing. SourcesB
Sources
- BOpentrons raises $40M (SiliconANGLE)siliconangle.com
This story ran in the Afternoon Brief of October 29th 2026.