Bay-area based cloud laboratory company Transcriptic has announced the completion of its Series A-1 fundraising round for the amount of $13.4 million. Venture investor Data Collective led the round and was joined by fellow return investor AME Cloud Ventures among others, as well as new investors Digital Science and WuXi AppTec.With this milestone, Transcriptic CEO Max Hodak took the opportunity to comment on Transcriptic’s progress and its impact in the life sciences. “Since we founded Transcriptic in 2012, we have seen a significant change in how the industry thinks about lab work,” he said. “The Transcriptic platform has freed researchers from many hours of painstaking, error-prone work and enabled them to focus where their time is most valuable. Our goal is to make life science research cheaper, faster, and more accessible, and today’s investment will enable us to deliver further innovations to make that a reality.”Matt Ocko, Managing Partner at the round’s lead investor Data Collective, also weighed in on the announcement and his group’s contribution to Transcriptic. “At Data Collective (DCVC), we are investing at the intersection of AI, robotics, and hyper-scale data and compute to transform global industries,” he said. “DCVC has doubled down on Transcriptic because they are uniting these technologies to free life sciences researchers from the heavy tax of assembly-line lab processes, enabling them to accelerate life-saving breakthroughs.”Who is Transcriptic?Incorporated just four years ago, Transcriptic’s platform consists of a “robotic cloud laboratory” that allows users to outsource their cellular and molecular biology lab work. Researchers are able to remotely commission experiments designed to their specifications via a cloud interface. The wet lab work is then carried out in Transcriptic’s automated foundry and results are reported back to users through the interface. The company’s goal is to deliver scalable experimentation capabilities with rapid, consistent results so that their customers can spend more time creating and less time toiling in the lab.Transcriptic is certainly not the only company that has scoped out the market for outsourced lab work. Among the startup’s competitors in the cloud laboratory space are Emerald Cloud Laboratory and Arcturus BioCloud, both of which share Transcriptic’s ambition to provide high-quality affordable lab work that can be custom-ordered from anywhere with a wireless connection.Take a step back from the cloud laboratory scene and it’s easy to see that automation, computer integration, and scalability are on the rise more broadly in the life sciences—all with the aim of streamlining researchers’ workflows and accelerating the realization of innovations. Dozens of budding startups have rallied around the need for products and services that fulfill these goals and more are surfacing all the time.Investors, too, have picked up on the unified trend toward automation and scalability within biotechnology and find the commonality these aspirations encouraging. One such investor is new Transcriptic backer Digital Science. “Our mission at Digital Science is to bring innovative tools to researchers that allow them to spend more time where they add most value, so Transcriptic is a perfect fit for us,” said Digital Science CEO Daniel Hook. “In addition to sharing very similar goals, there is also significant potential for cooperation and integration with other products in our portfolio of companies, including Tetrascience, Labguru, BioRAFT and Figshare.”What’s in store for the robotic cloud laboratory?This most recent Series A brings the company to a total of $27 million in funding since 2012. According to Transcriptic, this latest influx of capital will allow the company to proceed with plans for growth in both its team and its technology platform. Previously in 2015, Transcriptic conducted an $8.5 million-fundraising round which allowed the company to establish the automated foundry on which it is now expanding.Although a young company, Transcriptic already boasts an array of prestigious customers, and in early 2016 the company was credited with producing the most extensive dataset on computational enzyme design currently in existence. As Transcriptic’s customer base grows to capture a larger and more diverse set of users, we can expect to see even more exciting developments emerge from this robotic laboratory in the cloud.