Lab automation · Liquid handling robots

Opentrons

A cheap pipetting robot out of a Brooklyn hackerspace that scaled into New York City’s own COVID testing lab, then shut it and went back to selling robots.

A snowy drive to New Jersey

Late 2013. Will Canine drove out of Brooklyn into deep New Jersey on what he later called a bad day to drive. He wanted to see a machine a stranger had posted about on a do it yourself biology mailing list: a pipetting robot built from an open source 3D printer, the OpenTrons BioBot. The man who built it was Chiu Chau.

Genspace was the penthouse of a converted bank at 33 Flatbush Avenue, with a leaky roof, no air conditioning and no heat, as the Los Angeles Times reported in 2021. Canine had come to New York for Occupy Wall Street, had been jailed twice for protesting, and kept bungling the pipetting in his biotech classes. That is where the robot idea came from.

The problem is pipetting

Most wet lab biology is still a person moving microlitres of liquid from tube to tube, hundreds of times a day. Machines to do it existed, priced for institutions.

“Few labs can afford high priced robots but his at $4,000 is a very cheap piece of equipment for a lab,” Ellen Jorgensen, a Genspace co-founder who had taught Canine, told Technical.ly in 2018. She added the detail that explains the whole company: “not being a scientist, Will had no idea that lab pipetting robots already existed.”

A 2014 Kickstarter for the first machine raised $126,000 from 237 backers, and the team landed in Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 batch. The OT-2, launched in 2018, listed at $4,000 against competitors Canine put around $40,000. He built it on the desktop 3D printer supply chain, which is why the number worked.

Four names, and a handoff

Wikipedia lists three founders, Chiu Chau, Will Canine and Nicholas Wagner, and a founding year of 2014. Jonathan Brennan-Badal, a vice president of strategy at ComiXology and a Genspace board member, joined in 2014 and became chief executive.

The securities filings track the handoff without commentary. The Form D filed March 22, 2017 names two related persons: Chiu Chau and Will Canine, both officers and directors. The next filing, September 4, 2018, names Chiu Chau and Jonathan Badal. Canine is gone from the record. In 2021 he wrote that he and Chau had both stepped back.

The lab

In early 2020 the testing system failed. The federal assay fell flat, Quest and LabCorp backed up, and when the FDA opened emergency authorizations to more entrants the wall in front of small suppliers came down. Canine says Opentrons shipped more than 1,000 robots to hospitals and labs in the first six months of the pandemic.

Then New York City’s Economic Development Corporation put out a call for a dedicated testing lab. Opentrons answered it with Jef Boeke’s genetics lab at NYU Langone. “So the city asked Opentrons to build a lab, and we went from getting the keys to our new space to running patient samples in a matter of weeks,” Canine wrote.

The Pandemic Response Lab opened in September 2020 on the 12th floor of a building at First Avenue and East 29th Street. The New York Times reported the terms: the city and its public hospital system were the only customer, and the city would pay Opentrons $28 for each test, which Brennan-Badal said was less than a third of what some other laboratories charged. The lab had results on its first 712 samples and was running about 3,000 a day.

It grew fast. PRL says it reached capacity for 45,000 samples a day within a month, found the first four Omicron cases in New York City in December 2021, took College of American Pathologists accreditation with zero deficiencies in May 2022, and processed more than 11 million tests across three CLIA certified labs.

It closed on December 31, 2022. Crain’s New York Business, reading state Department of Labor filings, reported the Long Island City plant would shut and 185 workers would go.

Back to robots

The Flex launched in May 2023 as a two foot cube sold for a one time price rather than a subscription, with workstations starting below $50,000 for sequencing library preparation. In October 2025 BD agreed to integrate it with the Rhapsody single cell system. James Atwood, who had run the robotics unit since April 2023, became chief executive in July 2025, announced in January 2026.

What is proven, and what is still claimed

Read plainly: the money, the federal purchase orders, the code repository and the price the city paid are on the record and check out. The larger numbers rest on company statements, and two of those do not line up. The open source label is the softest claim here. The software is Apache licensed and active. The hardware stopped being open years ago.

What to watch

• The December 2025 Form D. It reports $20,118,247 sold of $56,618,247 offered, from two investors. An amendment would show whether the rest arrived.
• Board turnover. Only Myrtle Potter appears on both the 2021 and the 2025 filing.
• Whether the BD collaboration ships a product, and whether other instrument makers follow.
• Any revenue disclosure. The company declined to disclose a revenue range on every Form D it filed.
• Whether the hardware returns to an open license, or the open source label narrows to the software.

In their words

Opentrons funding profile on HVCFHealthcare Venture Capital Fund

Related companies

• BillionToOne: Also in Diagnostics. A Menlo Park laboratory that counts individual DNA molecules in blood, first to tell a pregnant patient whether her fetus is at risk for a recessive disease, now to read
• Notable Labs: Also in Diagnostics. A blood cancer company that screened drugs against a patient’s own cells to predict who would respond, in-licensed a shelved Boehringer Ingelheim compound, reached
• Cambridge Cancer Genomics: Also in Diagnostics. A Y Combinator backed British company that used repeat blood draws and machine learning to tell an oncologist when a cancer drug had stopped working
• Redcliffe Labs: Also in Diagnostics. A pan-India laboratory network built on cheap tests and doorstep collection

Sources

1. Public recordEight Form D filings, Opentrons Labworks Inc., CIK 0001701598SEC EDGAR · Mar 22, 2017 to Dec 5, 2025
2. Public recordFederal prime contract awards to Opentrons Labworks Inc.USAspending.gov · queried Sep 23, 2026
3. Public recordLocal Law 76 of 2020 COVID-19 Contracts, dataset 5w2t-dbacNYC Open Data · queried Sep 23, 2026
4. Public recordIn Vitro Diagnostics EUAs, Molecular Diagnostic Tests for SARS-CoV-2FDA · checked Sep 23, 2026
5. Public recordOpentrons repository metadataGitHub API · Sep 23, 2026
6. IndependentN.Y.C. Is Opening Its Own Virus Testing LabThe New York Times, Joseph Goldstein · Sep 16, 2020
7. IndependentThe untold story of how a robot army waged war on COVID-19Los Angeles Times, Emily Baumgaertner · Oct 15, 2021
8. IndependentCity Covid testing lab will close, lay off 185 workersCrain’s New York Business, Caroline Spivack · Dec 6, 2022
9. IndependentHow a biotech robotics startup raised $10 millionTechnical.ly, Tyler Woods · Mar 29, 2018
10. IndependentA cheap, pipette-wielding robotMIT Technology Review, Erin Winick · Mar 27, 2018
11. IndependentOpentrons Flex robotTechCrunch, Brian Heater · May 22, 2023
12. IndependentLab platform Opentrons closes $200M series CFierce Biotech, Andrea Park · Sep 23, 2021
13. FounderOpentrons, and Beyond!Will Canine, personal site · 2021