CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 3, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Elemental Machines, provider of intelligent technology for the smart lab, today introduced a new suite of products to help scientists accelerate time to discovery by improving experimental reproducibility, one of the top challenges in research. The company has raised $2.5 million in seed financing from leading venture capital firms and investors, including FF Angel, Max Levchin, Project 11 Ventures, 2M Companies (family office of Morton H. Meyerson), and Rock Health.
With global spending on life sciences research and development (R&D) exceeding $200 billion[1], reproducibility the ability to successfully replicate an experiment and its result is one of the most pervasive issues faced by the scientific community. Lack of reproducibility directly impacts the overall cost and time to market for new drugs and therapies across industries, including pharma, biotech, medtech, and synthetic biology.
Much like “smart home” products have pervaded the consumer space, Elemental Machines is transforming science with “smart lab” products. The EM Suite is a rich set of tools that measures the leading sources of experimental variability, such as temperature, humidity, vibration, light, and instrumentation to provide scientists with visibility into how these factors can subtly corrupt experimental results.
“We are giving scientists an easy, powerful, and cost-effective way to collect and visualize a variety of critical data that traditionally haven’t been taken into account essentially to debug the lab environment,” said Sridhar Iyengar, President, CEO and Co-founder of Elemental Machines. “Unlike software engineers, who have an array of tools for debugging code, research scientists have not had a comparable set of resources to do the same in the physical world. Until now.”
Founded by a team with deep expertise in wearables, medical devices, and data analytics, the company is led by Sridhar Iyengar, President and CEO, Elicia Wong, CTO, Gary Tsai, VP Engineering, and Sonny Vu, who is serving on the Board of Directors. The team has successfully built Misfit, which was recently acquired by Fossil Group, and AgaMatrix, a leader in consumer healthcare technology that has shipped more than 6 million devices and 2 billion sensors. AgaMatrix developed the first medical device to connect to the iPhone, which was distributed by Sanofi and the Apple store, and has partnerships with leading pharmacies, including CVS and Walgreens.
“Elemental Machines is poised to have a profound impact on how research is performed,” said Brian Singerman, Partner at Founders Fund. “Sridhar has spent his career building companies that demonstrate the power of connected devices, and now he is using this expertise to tackle one of the biggest challenges scientists face.”
About the EM Suite
Designed specifically for scientific research environments, the EM Suite features:
- Elemental Insights -- an intuitive web-based software application that provides real-time visualizations and dashboards to pinpoint factors affecting outcomes,
- Elements -- Networks of distributed intelligent sensors that passively monitor the lab environment, and
- Elemental Alerts Text and email notifications should any of the Elements encounter an anomaly.
“Imagine being able to eliminate inconsistent outcomes caused by variations in contextual and environmental conditions, and having the essential data available on any device, anywhere, at any time,” said Elicia Wong, CTO and Founder of Elemental Machines. “This is a game-changing approach that is already delivering real-world benefits in multiple customer environments.”
The EM Suite is deployed in leading laboratories across life sciences, chemistry, and independent collaborative laboratories, including Cambridge, MA-based LabCentral. “Providing state-of-the-art technologies is a hallmark of our facility, and we are delighted to feature the EM Suite in our labs,” said Johannes Fruehauf, MD, PhD, Co-founder and President of LabCentral. “The Elemental Machines solution is helping our resident scientists easily measure the effects of environmental variables to accelerate their research.”
About Elemental Machines
Elemental Machines is accelerating scientific discovery with a powerful application suite for improving experimental reproducibility. With offices in Cambridge, MA and Burlingame, CA the company is led an accomplished entrepreneurial team committed to addressing some of the scientific community’s biggest challenges. For more information, please visit www.elementalmachines.io.
Note to editors: Elemental Machines, Elemental Insights are trademarks of Elemental Machines.
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SOURCE Elemental Machines
