A Danish startup wants to help RD teams automate lab experiments that require visual inspections, raising $20 million in a Series A round of funding to scale its technology in the U.S.Reshape, which was founded out of Copenhagen in 2018, has developed a robotic imaging system replete with software and AI models to help scientists track visual changes — such as color or cell-growth rates — from Petri dishes and similar plate formats. Its machines sport built-in incubation that can be set to specific temperatures, with the corresponding data logged to ensure the experiments can be easily repeated.The benefit is that these experiments can be run 24/7 without direct supervision, freeing up technicians for other critical tasks.Reshape’s machine in action Image Credits: Reshape“Decoding nature”The concept of “decoding nature” sits at the heart of what Reshape is setting out to achieve, building on a broader trend that has seen the lines blur between the natural and manufactured worlds. These opportunities have not been lost on Silicon Valley, evidenced by the countless money poured into technologies seeking to “engineer” biology.“Biology as a whole is transitioning from a science to an engineering discipline, and I think one of the biggest things that we want to do is make some of the very ‘intangible’ — how does an object grow, how does it behave? — easier to describe,” Reshape CEO Carl-Emil Grøn told TechCrunch. “Ideally, we want to figure out how we make that translation layer between what happens in the real world, and what happens in your DNA.”The genesis for Reshape came when Grøn, who has an engineering background himself, started dating someone who worked in the biotech industry, giving him insight into the amount of manual effort involved in lab experiments.“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,” Grøn said. “When you are from the tech world, it just seemed crazy.”After speaking to a bunch of biotech companies in the Copenhagen locale, Grøn realized that his initial experience wasn’t some weird anomaly: The way that labs carry out DNA-sequencing, measure chemical compositions and all the rest was still happening in more or less the same way as it had been done for more than a century.So Grøn enlisted two co-founders, Daniel Storgaard and Magnus Madsen, and set about building a full-stack platform, replete with high-resolution cameras and lighting, to capture visual data points and time-lapses and record how different components in a given experiment react to the conditions they are subjected to.Under the hoodReshape develops its own AI models, trained on in-house data at its own lab, and these can work from the get-go for some of the more common experiment types, such as those involving fungal or bacterial hosts, or seeds and insects. But the company can also help its customers train models for specific use-cases, such as tracking how particular microbes behave under certain conditions.“The Reshape data science team, using our custom-built MLops architecture, handles this end-to-end, starting from understanding the desired output and quantification, annotating the required datasets at scale, developing and benchmarking models, and then deploying them in our product for our customers,” Grøn said.An agriculture company, for example, can use Reshape to test for seed germination rates, or the severity of a specific disease

In addition, ACME Capital Partner, Christian Tang-Jespersen, joins Reshape’s Board of Directors.

Reshape Biotech, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based provider of an integrated hardware and software platform digitizing microbiology experiments, raised $8.1M in funding.Reshape Biotech founders Carl-Emil Grøn Christensen, Magnus Madsen and Daniel Storgaard (Photo: Business Wire). The round was led by ACME Capital, with participation from FundersClub, Y Combinator, Nicholas Francis and Per Falholt. In addition, ACME Capital Partner, Christian Tang-Jespersen, joins Reshape’s Board of Directors.The company intends to use the funds to expand its product offerings and team. Led by founder CEO Carl-Emil Grøn, Reshape Biotech is dedicated to helping enterprises in food, agriculture and biology digitize research and collaborate globally through a lab equipment and infrastructure vertically integrating across hardware, software and biotech, with in-house development, manufacturing and application expertise. A member of the Y Combinator 2021 class, the company allows companies to digitize microbiology experiments and virtually collaborate on a global scale. Reshape currently serves 20 customers including researchers, scientists, lab techs and CXOs working in agricultural and food microbiology, ingredients development, industrial biotech and more.The company currently distributes equipment across Europe and the U.S