Synthace, the developer of Antha OS for automating laboratory processes for biological experiments, raises $25.6M Series B led by Horizons Ventures
U.K.-based startup Synthace wants to automate laboratory processes with a programming language designed for biological experiments, and it's getting the financial backing to do it.
Context & Ripple Effects
Synthace's $25.6M Series B lands mid-way through a sustained funding run for the software layer of biological R&D. A year later, Benchling raised a $34.5M Series C for biotech research management, and in 2021 Artificial pulled in a $21.5M Series A for software that automates life science labs — investors repeatedly backing teams that treat the wet lab as a programmable environment rather than a bench of manual protocols.
Antha OS is Synthace's bet on the deepest layer of that stack: a programming language for biological experiments itself. The raise matters because it positions the U.K. startup against both the record-keeping layer (Benchling) and rival automation-software plays, years before foundation-model vendors entered the same labs.
First-order effects
- Horizons Ventures' lead gives Synthace the capital to scale Antha OS beyond early deployments, putting it in direct competition for lab budgets with Artificial's lab-automation software and Benchling's research platform.
Second-order effects
- Downstream tooling attracts its own scale capital — Synthego's $100M Series D for ML-driven genome engineering shows funders paying up across the automated-biology stack, forcing labs to choose between integrated platforms and best-of-breed point tools.
Third-order effects
- By 2025 the entry path changes: Anthropic's Claude Life Sciences integrates AI models directly with lab tools like Benchling, meaning the OS-layer startups funded in this era now compete with foundation-model vendors embedded in their customers' workflows.
The trend: Venture capital has spent a decade funding successive layers of laboratory automation — from experiment-programming languages to AI copilots wired into bench software — steadily converting manual biological R&D into a software-managed workflow.