Meet Sajith Wickramasekara who built $6B firm for life science researchers
Sajith Wickramasekara established a software startup to assist life science researchers in better organising their lab work.The company, called lBenchling, is now worth $6 billion. Sajith Wickramasekara stepped out of MIT's Computer Science school ten years ago to start something new: a software startup that helps life science researchers organise their lab work. Benchling is now known as the "Google Docs for R&D," serving over 200,000 researchers from 700 firms. However, that value proposition was less obvious in 2012. Benchling got its start when software investors weren't clamouring to fund cloud-based digital notebooks and, even more so, weren't familiar with biotech's issue spaces. This made the early days exceptionally difficult, but it finally spurred Wickramasekara and co-founder Ashu Singhal to focus on engineering and product development. Wickramasekara's hard effort was not in vain; he knew there was something there. He spent ...