Lab automation · Microbiology
Reshape Biotech
A Copenhagen company that builds one robot for each routine job in a microbiology lab: pouring agar, incubating plates, photographing them and counting what grows. Its Danish accounts are public, and they are blunter than the press releases.
Every eighth hour, a photograph
Carl-Emil Grøn was not looking for a business in biology. He had moved to Copenhagen to study mechanical engineering, and spent his spare hours on a student rocket team and an electric race car. Then he started dating someone who worked in biotech.
“I just assumed that biotech was massively automated, but every eighth hour, of every day, for five months straight, she had to go in to the lab and take a photo of a petri dish,” he told TechCrunch in 2024. “When you are from the tech world, it just seemed crazy.”
He asked around the Copenhagen biotech cluster. The answer came back the same everywhere. Sequencing had been industrialised. Reading a plate had not.
The job nobody automated
Microbiology still runs on a dish of nutrient jelly and a pair of eyes. Somebody pours the agar. Somebody puts the plate in a warm box. Somebody comes back and decides whether anything grew, how much, and what colour it turned. The last step is the subjective one.
Reshape went at the first step first. The Danish engineering weekly Ingeniøren watched its Media Plate Filler in 2020: it doses agar into 30 plates of 24 wells in about 25 minutes, work that takes a technician roughly two hours by hand. The deliberate limit is the strategy. Most vendors try to build one machine that does everything, Grøn argued, and end up with something too complex to use. Reshape builds one machine per operation.
Three engineers off a student rocket team
Grøn met Magnus Nyborg Madsen and Daniel Storgaard through DTU student projects, the rocket team Danstar and the racing team Vermilion Racing. They had been building small robots for professors in the biotech department, and Grøn told them it was a waste of time before he got curious. By late 2020 the company was eight people, average age around 24, assembling machines at Christian X’s Alle in Kongens Lyngby on roughly 700,000 kroner of soft money from Innobooster and DTU Skylab plus a first cheque from Unity co-founder Nicholas Francis.
From one machine to a fleet
Y Combinator took Reshape into its Winter 2021 batch, and a $1 million pre-seed closed that March, led by FundersClub. Then came the advice that redirected the company: Europe was too fragmented, so ship to America instead. In February 2023 Reshape announced $8.1 million led by ACME Capital, which the Danish press called the country’s largest seed round. In April 2024 Astanor Ventures led a $20 million Series A.
The product had become a platform: a Smart Incubator holding 75 petri dishes or 50 microtiter plates and imaging them from every ten minutes upward across five temperature zones, and a High-throughput Imaging Device that sorts standard 90 mm quality control plates into positives, negatives and too numerous to count. The company names Syngenta, the University of Oxford and Imperial College London as users. In March 2026 it joined RAPIDFUNG, a four-year DTU-led consortium that intends to profile 20,000 fungal isolates.
What the Danish register holds
Reshape trades as Reshape ApS, CVR 40056173, registered on 23 November 2018 and audited by KPMG. In the year to 31 March 2026 it lost 42.6 million kroner, up from 35.6 million. Gross profit, the only income line a company this size must publish, fell from 6.6 million kroner to 5.3 million. Equity was 75.5 million kroner on a balance sheet of 87.8 million.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Danish annual accounts | Fiscal year ends 31 March. Loss: 1.6M kroner (2022), 4.6M, 12.2M, 35.6M, then 42.6M (2026). Gross profit 1.7M, 6.6M, then 5.3M across the last three. Revenue is not disclosed. | Public record |
| Registered ownership | The CVR entry lists NPF Technologies ApS as an owner. It sits under NPF Technologies Holding ApS, wholly owned by Nicholas Peter Francis, the Unity co-founder who backed the 2021 pre-seed. The stake size is not shown. | Public record |
| Public research grant | Innovation Fund Denmark grant of DKK 18,127,356 against a DKK 26,647,061 budget over four years, to a consortium of DTU, Reshape, BioSense Solutions and Mycoverse. | Public record |
| US records | No FDA 510(k) or PMA, registered trial, NIH or NSF award, SEC Form D, or PubMed paper reporting data captured on a Reshape instrument, as of September 2026. | Not found |
| Headcount | 54 employees in the Danish register, 51 on a second mirror. The Y Combinator page still shows 40. | Registers disagree |
| Performance claims | Syngenta case study: 400 percent more throughput, 80 percent fewer false negatives, 25 percent fewer replicates. Feb 2023: 20 customers, 110 robots, 100 percent retention. None audited. | Company-stated |
| Instrument throughput | Three figures on the company’s own pages: 450 plates per hour in the May 2026 release, 650 in the product headline, 600 in the specification table below it. | Company figures differ |
Read plainly: the machines are in real labs at real companies, and the register confirms a business large enough to employ 54 people and consume 42 million kroner a year. What is missing is a number a buyer could audit. Revenue is undisclosed, the performance figures come from the vendor, and no independent scientist has published a paper that leans on the instruments. For a tools company, that last gap is usually the first to close.
What to watch
- The accounts for the year to 31 March 2027. Gross profit fell in the latest year while losses grew by a fifth.
- Any new round. The last was April 2024, and register arithmetic suggests that money arrived across two fiscal years.
- The first peer-reviewed paper reporting results captured on a Reshape instrument.
- The RAPIDFUNG dataset: 20,000 fungal isolates profiled to one standard would be the largest public proof yet.
- Whether the quality control product wins paying food and beverage labs, a different sale from research budgets.
In their words
“I just assumed that biotech was massively automated, but every eighth hour, of every day, for five months straight, she had to go in to the lab and take a photo of a petri dish,”
Carl-Emil Grøn, CEO and co-founder, TechCrunch, 2024 · Independent
“Det skal være ligesom en mikroovn: Jeg skal varme min mad, så jeg sætter det i ovnen og drejer på knappen”
Carl-Emil Grøn to Ingeniøren, 2020, on wanting a lab robot as easy to run as a microwave · Independent
“We have self-driving cars and AI tools that can do crazy things, but biotech workflows look kind of like 1990.”
Carl-Emil Grøn, The Spoon podcast, June 2025 · Independent
“In the end, after some amazing advice from Y Combinator, we ended up shipping robot number 14 to the US.”
Carl-Emil Grøn, Silicon Republic, April 2024 · Independent
“Biotech is the most important industry of the 21st century. For it to flourish in the future, we have to make the discovery process more accessible and affordable.”
Carl-Emil Grøn, seed round announcement, February 2023 · Company release
“Biology is far too complex and multivariate to be analyzed manually.”
Harry Briggs, Astanor Ventures, quoted by ArcticStartup, April 2024 · Investor
“My dream, maybe one day, is to open source all of this data and just make it available to the world,”
Carl-Emil Grøn, The Spoon podcast, June 2025 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordReshape ApS, CVR 40056173, accounts 2022 to 2026
- Public recordReshape ApS entry: owners, employees, figures
- Public recordNPF Technologies ApS, CVR 33243731, and the Francis ownership chain
- Public recordRAPIDFUNG project facts and grant figures
- Public recordRecords pull: no FDA, trial, NIH, NSF, PubMed or Form D match
- IndependentReshape wants to help decode nature by automating the visual part of lab experiments
- IndependentBiotekrobot gør indtog i laboratoriet
- IndependentDanish Reshape bags $20M in Series A funding
- IndependentDanish startup secures the largest seed round in the country’s history
- IndependentHow ReShape is using AI to accelerate biotech research
- CompanyWe have raised $20m in our Series A
- CompanySyngenta and Imperial case studies, Smart Incubator and HTID product pages
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
