Opentrons CEO, Jon Brennan-Badal joined SLAS’ podcast “New Matter: Inside the minds of SLAS” to chat about Opentrons’ beginning and how it all lead our open source automation, accessible API, and now the Opentrons Flex.
In this 40-minute podcast with SLAS’ Hannah Rosen, Jon takes the listener through the evolution of both his personal career and the trajectory of Opentrons. From his entrepreneurial start with Comixology, a digital comic book company that he later sold to and fostered at Amazon, Jon has always wanted to solve complex challenges faced by the world. He saw that the robotics and life science industry had a major hurdle that scientists had to overcome: accessibility.
When joining Opentrons and creating our first iteration robot, he and our team as a whole decided to tackle the problem of accessibility by taking an “outsider” prospective. Opentrons began as a project led by biohackers that wanted to bring innovation into the life science space that wasn’t being done at the time. Nine years later and the innovation created in the early days on Opentrons has culminated in the most affordable and accessible robots in the life science industry: the OT-2 and the Opentrons Flex.
One of the fundamental tenants of Opentrons is open source hardware and software, meaning a single platform can support a multitude of different applications across several life science industries. As Jon says in the podcast, “We see the story of life science is really the long tale of all these unique different kind of applications within the lab because there’s all these different specialized areas of research that all have specialized sets of needs and it’s impossible for any one company to be able to meaningfully address and serve kind of all of those range of needs.” That’s where Opentrons being open source is different from the standard life science automation company.
Listen to the full podcast here.
