Opentrons raises $40 million Series E led by Avego for AI lab automation

Opentrons frames the funding around a mismatch it says AI has created: frontier models can generate hypotheses and design experiments far faster than physical laboratories can test them, leaving the lab itself as the bottleneck. Its answer is the Opentrons Flex platform, which combines robots and AI systems so experiments can be designed, run and improved in a continuous loop.

The company says the new capital from Avego and BroadOak Capital Partners will fund that next phase of autonomous science — AI-driven experimental execution, broader automation capabilities, and expansion into new markets and geographies — alongside faster protocol development through its software and AI and deeper integration into the wider lab automation ecosystem. Avego's James Flexner argues that every AI-driven discovery still has to be tested in a real lab, and that drug developers and AI companies alike are moving toward automated workflows that generate usable data.

Opentrons points to its installed base as evidence it is positioned for that shift: more than a decade of lab automation experience, an open platform, and over 11,000 robots deployed in over 80 countries, including at 90 percent of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies. Whether autonomous science standardizes on Opentrons' platform, as CEO James Atwood asserts, is the open question the funding is meant to help answer.