BenchSci
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2016
- HeadquartersToronto, Canada
- Headcount101–250
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
BenchSci firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- BenchSci
- Legal name
- Scinapsis Analytics Inc.
- Website
- https://benchsci.com
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2016
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 101–250 employees
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
BenchSci industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Drug Discovery AI Platform
- NAICS
- Research and Development in Biotechnology (except Nanobiotechnology) (541714), Scientific Research and Development Services (5417)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Commercial Physical & Biological Research (8731)
- akta.pro primary industry
- AI/ML Platforms for Drug Discovery & Experiment Optimization (HLAGAJAO)
- akta.pro secondary industries
- Bioinformatics & Multi-omics Analysis Software (HLAGAJAD), Scientific Data Management & Data Platforms (SDMS/Data Lakehouse for R&D) (HLAGAJAC)
Keywords
Where BenchSci is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Toronto
- HQ country
- Canada
- HQ region
- North America
Offices1 record
Markets served
BenchSci business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Operations, Others
Revenue model
- Enterprise Software Licenses: Subscription-based licensing model for pharmaceutical, biotech, and research organizations. Industry Users access the platform through corporate email and paid subscription plans. Academic Users receive free access through institutional email verification at approved post-secondary institutions.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Others | Academic Free Tier |
Go-to-market motion1 record
Distribution channels1 record
Marketing channels6 records
BenchSci product offering
Product offeringCore offering
BenchSci develops and sells AI-powered software platforms (EMET and ASCEND) that accelerate preclinical drug discovery for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Its flagship EMET agentic workbench unifies data, models, workflows, and scientific reasoning into a single environment, while ASCEND is a neurosymbolic AI platform backed by a proprietary Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph with 858M nodes and 2.2B relationships. The platforms help scientists with hypothesis generation, target identification, experiment design, reagent selection, and lead optimization by orchestrating reasoning across 38M+ scientific publications and closed-access papers.
Product overview
BenchSci offers a unified AI-powered platform for preclinical R&D centered on two main products: EMET and ASCEND. EMET is the flagship agentic workbench that provides an orchestration layer for complex scientific reasoning, while ASCEND is the underlying neurosymbolic AI platform featuring a Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph built on Neo4j technology. Within ASCEND, the Selector application helps scientists select reagents and model systems. The platform integrates access to 38M+ scientific publications (including 16M closed-access papers via publisher partnerships), 780K patents, 310K preprints, and proprietary curated data including 16M antibodies, 22M RNAi entries, 18M CRISPR records, 500K cell lines, and 700K animal models. BenchSci serves pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and academic institutions (4,500+), with nine of the top ten global pharmaceutical companies as customers.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Brands
- ASCEND: A neurosymbolic AI platform that integrates public and proprietary research data into a Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph, enabling researchers to understand disease biology, generate hypotheses, and optimize experimental design.
- EMET
- Selector
Products and services
- EMET EMET is BenchSci's flagship agentic workbench that unifies data, models, software packages, workflows, lab-in-the-loop capabilities, and scientific reasoning into a single environment purpose-built for preclinical R&D. Scientists ask complex research questions in plain language, and the orchestration layer decomposes them, identifies domain-specific skills, and chains them across 38M+ scientific publications (including 16M closed-access papers) to deliver traceable, explainable insights for hypothesis generation, target identification, experiment design, and lead optimization.
- ASCEND ASCEND is a neurosymbolic AI platform that integrates public and proprietary research data into a Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph, combining foundation models with peer-reviewed literature, multi-omics datasets, and clinical trial evidence. Adopted by nine of the top ten global pharmaceutical companies and 4,500+ research institutions, it helps biopharma scientists evaluate evidence and inform early development decisions.
- Selector Selector is an application within the ASCEND platform that uses AI to analyze 27M+ publications and 85M+ products from 450 vendors, recommending suitable reagents (antibodies, CRISPR, proteins, RNAi, cell products, PCR primers) and model systems (animal models) based on experiment context, validation conditions, and bioinformatics data to reduce reagent waste and improve reproducibility.
- LEAP (Life Sciences Evidence-based AI Platform) LEAP is a BenchSci life sciences evidence-based AI platform offering launched in November 2025 as part of the company's evolving product portfolio for biomedical research.
Quantifiable outcome
- 60% increase in productivity for Novo Nordisk
- +3 more outcomes
Companies that use BenchSci
Customer profileNamed customers7 records
Segments3 records
Ideal customer profiles3 records
BenchSci technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- No
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
AI capability9 records
Feature5 records
BenchSci partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
Eight partnerships are on record, tiered flagship, strategic and core.
- Thermo Fisher ScientificflagshipStrategic partnership announced June 2026 to create AI-powered tools that combine BenchSci's AI technology with Thermo Fisher's global lab equipment footprint. The collaboration aims to transform preclinical research by enhancing experimental design and scientific data interpretation. This builds on a September 2025 partnership announcement.
- NVIDIAstrategicStrategic relationship as part of Thermo Fisher's AI ecosystem announcements. BenchSci is among the AI companies partnered with NVIDIA for AI-enabled workflows in pharma and biotech.
- OpenAIstrategicStrategic relationship for AI-enabled workflows. BenchSci is included in Thermo Fisher's strategic relationships with AI providers including OpenAI for strengthening data intelligence offerings.
- GooglestrategicOngoing partnership with Google for generative AI integration. BenchSci uses Google Gemini for Workspaces internally achieving 89% adoption among employees. The company is also working with Google to validate the MedLM model for life sciences applications.
- Neo4jcoreBenchSci enhances drug discovery by creating a computable map of disease biology using its ASCEND platform built on Neo4j graph database technology. The platform integrates vast biological evidence to facilitate complex research questions, with the knowledge graph linking over 400 million entities and one billion relationships.
- MerckcoreRenewed two-year agreement to support preclinical disease biology research using the ASCEND AI platform. The agreement enhances Merck's efforts to integrate AI into scientific workflows and enables rapid, explainable insights into disease biology. The platform leverages a curated knowledge graph and advanced models to aid early discovery and decision-making.
- MilastrategicMulti-year partnership with Mila, Montréal's leading AI research center, to develop AI systems for biological inference and experimental assay prediction. The collaboration aims to advance autonomous drug discovery and enhance predictive generative modeling in biopharmaceutical research.
- SanoficoreThree-year global license agreement providing Sanofi's worldwide preclinical research organization access to the ASCEND AI platform. The neurosymbolic AI system integrates public and proprietary research data into a Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph, enabling researchers to better understand disease biology, generate hypotheses, and optimize experimental design across Sanofi's global research sites.
Scale indicators7 records
Recent moves7 records
Expansion highlights7 records
BenchSci competitors and assessment
Company assessmentDirect peers
- Atomwise: Atomwise applies AI (AtomNet) to small-molecule drug discovery and partners with major pharma on preclinical pipelines — closely comparable to BenchSci's AI-for-preclinical-discovery positioning, with similar enterprise licensing motion into pharma.
- Owkin: Owkin applies AI to biomedical research with a strong focus on multi-omics and clinical data, partnering with pharma — comparable to BenchSci's multi-omics-enabled Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph and pharma-enterprise GTM.
- Insitro: Insitro is a machine-learning-driven drug discovery company combining high-throughput biology with AI models to predict drug behavior — directly comparable to BenchSci in applying AI/ML to preclinical pharma R&D, with overlapping customer base among large pharma.
- Isomorphic Labs: Isomorphic Labs (Alphabet/DeepMind spin-out) builds AI for drug discovery with major pharma partnerships — directly comparable to BenchSci's ASCEND/EMET as an AI-driven preclinical platform competing for the same pharma enterprise accounts and discovery workflows.
- Exscientia: Exscientia is an AI-driven drug discovery company with both platform and pipeline assets and major pharma partnerships — a direct peer to BenchSci in applying AI to preclinical pharma discovery with overlapping customer base among top-10 pharma.
Broad incumbents
- Recursion Pharmaceuticals: Recursion is a publicly traded AI-driven drug discovery company combining high-throughput experimental biology with foundation models — broadly comparable to BenchSci as a larger, more vertically integrated incumbent in AI drug discovery spanning both platform and pipeline assets.
- Schrödinger: Schrödinger is a publicly traded computational chemistry and molecular simulation platform serving pharma — a broad incumbent comparable to BenchSci in computational tools for preclinical research but more focused on physics-based simulation than knowledge-graph reasoning.
Emerging players
- Cradle Bio: Cradle applies generative AI to protein engineering and biologics design — an emerging player with partial overlap to BenchSci's AI-for-biology positioning, focused specifically on biologics rather than the broader preclinical scope.
- Iambic Therapeutics: Iambic is an early-stage AI drug discovery company combining neural network potentials with experimental chemistry — an emerging peer with partial overlap to BenchSci's preclinical AI focus, narrower in therapeutic scope but technically adjacent.
- EvolutionaryScale: EvolutionaryScale develops frontier AI models for biology (ESM family of protein language models) — thematically adjacent to BenchSci's orchestration of biological foundation models (ESM-2, AbLang2), positioning them as both potential partner and competitor in AI-for-biology infrastructure.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat5 records
Key risks6 records
Key highlights7 records
Customer concentration
BenchSci social profiles
Digital presenceBenchSci compliance and trust
Trust signalCompliance1 record
BenchSci financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
BenchSci leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles9 records
BenchSci funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds9 records
Investors16 records
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
BenchSci M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about BenchSci
What does BenchSci do?
BenchSci develops and sells AI-powered software platforms (EMET and ASCEND) that accelerate preclinical drug discovery for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Its flagship EMET agentic workbench unifies data, models, workflows, and scientific reasoning into a single environment, while ASCEND is a neurosymbolic AI platform backed by a proprietary Biological Evidence Knowledge Graph with 858M nodes and 2.2B relationships. The platforms help scientists with hypothesis generation, target identification, experiment design, reagent selection, and lead optimization by orchestrating reasoning across 38M+ scientific publications and closed-access papers.
Is BenchSci a public or private company?
BenchSci is a private company. It is classified as venture growth investor backed and is currently operating.
When was BenchSci founded?
BenchSci was founded in 2016. It employs 101 to 250 people.
Where is BenchSci based?
BenchSci is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, in the North America region.
How does BenchSci make money?
One revenue line is on record: enterprise Software Licenses.
Who are BenchSci's main competitors?
Direct peers on record are Atomwise, Owkin, Insitro, Isomorphic Labs and Exscientia. Broad incumbents are Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Schrödinger. Emerging players are Cradle Bio, Iambic Therapeutics and EvolutionaryScale.
Does BenchSci have an API?
No public API is recorded for BenchSci.
What industry is BenchSci in?
BenchSci's product category is Drug Discovery AI Platform. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HLAGAJAO, AI/ML Platforms for Drug Discovery & Experiment Optimization, with a secondary code of HLAGAJAD, Bioinformatics & Multi-omics Analysis Software. Its NAICS code is 541714 and its SIC code is 7372.