Founded by a biologist and an architect, our team has exemplified the power of interdisciplinary collaboration from its beginning.
Mariana Matus, PhD, and Newsha Ghaeli, Co-Founders of Biobot, met while studying at MIT. Mariana was working on a wastewater epidemiology thesis for her PhD in Computational Biology and Newsha was studying smart city technologies in an MIT Research Fellowship. Coming together in the MIT Underworlds Project, Mariana and Newsha spun out Biobot after winning several entrepreneur competitions at MIT and completing the Y Combinator accelerator in San Francisco, and became the first company in the world to commercialize wastewater data.
Biobot initially launched with a focus on monitoring opioids in wastewater in 2017. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in early 2020, the Company was able to quickly create and validate a COVID-19 detection assay and launched a pro bono campaign for communities around the country to share samples for testing. This rapid pivot indicated the versatility of wastewater epidemiology as a whole, and Biobot’s established and proven wastewater analysis platform. Biobot has entrenched itself as the market-leading provider for wastewater testing data. It now services nearly 600 testing sites across the country, working with federal, state and local governments and private enterprises to monitor and track community health. While clinical data remains the gold standard for disease surveillance and tracking, its limiting factors include reporting biases and an inability to track asymptomatic patients. With wastewater epidemiology, a real-time, non-invasive and cost effective understanding of a community’s health is possible.
* New Era of Community Health Resilience: Biobot Analytics is bringing never-before-seen community health monitoring data to stakeholders across the country, powered by wastewater-based epidemiology (“WBE”). Population health surveillance-as-a-service could prevent the next pandemic before it begins, identify asymptomatic or invisible patient populations while democratizing the healthcare system, detect waves in illicit drug use and manufacturing, and improve national security through identification of manmade threats.
* Creating a New Market through Rapid Adoption: Wastewater epidemiology was still a nascent field when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Since then, Biobot has been both leading and capitalizing on a surge of demand across multiple customer segments, and in multiple areas of public health beyond COVID-19. Biobot is currently serving a nationwide contract with the U.S. Center for Disease Control (“CDC”), state contracts with Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington, and many contracts with local governments, Fortune 500 companies, universities, and more. Biobot has also begun licensing the largest WBE database in the world with a major pharmaceutical company, proving out a significant value proposition.
* Proven, Validated, & Scalable Technology: Biobot’s WBE platform has been validated by several independent sources, including the CDC and the World Bank, among others, and the Company has become recognized as a world leader in the emerging field. WBE is capable of monitoring many aspects of community health beyond COVID-19, including other emerging viruses like Monkeypox and Influenza, High Risk Substances (“HRS”) like opioids, STDs, and more.
* Durable Business Model: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, many Biobot customers operated on a month-to-month basis. Since then, the Company has successfully transitioned to a long-term contract model and expanded services beyond COVID-19 monitoring, with 95% of customers on long-term contracts, and 68% of sites paying for non-COVID testing. 33% of 4Q22 revenue came from Monkeypox testing, and 50% of 4Q22 bookings for HRS.
* Diversified Growth Strategy: Biobot has a clear growth strategy to maximize the Company’s momentum in the coming years. By focusing on growing the number of sites per payer with additional testing assays, growing customer counts in existing markets like state & local governments, universities and international expansions, and entering new markets with its data offering, Biobot has significant opportunities for growth.
* Technical & Experienced Team: Co-Founders Mariana Matus, PhD, and Newsha Ghaeli met while during their graduate studies at MIT, where they collaborated on the MIT Underworlds Project which served as the scientific foundation for Biobot. Since then, they’ve brought together a team of 131 FTEs including 10+ PhDs, and deep domain expertise in molecular biology, data science, and AI.
* Deep Pocketed and Strategic Investors: New and existing investors in Biobot include Valor Equity Partners, Thursday Ventures, The Engine, DCVC, In-Q-Tel, the American Family Insurance Institute, Y Combinator and Anne Wojcicki. This diverse set of investors can provide long-term support for the Company’s growth through capital investment and strategic support.
* Convertible Note Opportunity: Biobot is raising a $10M Convertible Note with a $xxcap, with participation from Thursday Ventures and Valor Equity Partners, Plum Alley Ventures Fund I, among others. The planned use of proceeds include expansions of the sales, marketing, and lab operations teams, as well as further investment in the data science product and development of new testing assays.
Biobot is raising up to $15M in Series A extension funding at a pre-money valuation of ~$120M, the post-money valuation from the 2021 Series A. The round is being led by Series A lead Thursday Ventures, an early investor in Whoop, a health wearables company valued at ~$4B. New investors include Valor Equity Partners, whose portfolio includes Bird, AMP Robotics, Neuralink and Republic. Other investors in the Company include In-Q-Tel, 23andMe Founder Anne Wojcicki, the MIT accelerator The Engine, DCVC, Homebrew Ventures, Soma Capital, the American Family Insurance Institute. The Company has also completed the Y Combinator and Plug and Play accelerator programs.
Biobot will predominantly use the Series A Extension funding to scale internal sales and marketing teams and build out a dedicated domestic production facility to improve lab operations. Further details of the Company's use of proceeds is available in the data room. Plum Alley has successfully secured an allocation for syndicate member investors and the Plum Alley Ventures Fund.
Commercial Updates
With the end of the official Federal COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) on May 11th, 2023, the CDC and other government agencies have announced changes to its approach to monitoring and combatting COVID-19 in the US. However, of critical importance to Biobot, the CDC has confirmed that WBE will remain a core part of its monitoring operations moving forward, preserving a valuable opportunity for the Company. Biobot’s new contract with the CDC has been confirmed to be for a five-year period.
Through the first four months of 2023, Biobot has realized $12M in revenue, in line with the Company’s projections for total 2023 revenues to reach $39M. Notably, 25% of this revenue is attributed to non-COVID products and services, with growth in the second half of the year expected to be driven from increased demand for other respiratory viruses (ie. flu, RSV), as well as continued adoption of HRS assays. State and local governments have access to $26B of opioid settlement funds, providing a significant market opportunity for Biobot. In addition, the Company is bringing Xylazine to the platform, which was recently named an emerging threat by the White House.
Recent Wins
Biobot has achieved several recent new customer deployments, including:
- 2 new counties (COVID-19, HRS)
- 1 new state (COVID-19, norovirus, monkeypox, flu)
- 1 enterprise renewal for 6 locations (COVID-19)
Product Updates
In addition to the rollout of Xylazine testing assays, Biobot has also achieved notable progress on its Data-as-a-Service offering for enterprise customers. Through further developments in its software platform, the Company is now able to ingest data from external partners across the world, unlocking greater use cases for customers like pharmaceutical and biotech companies.
Testing Product Traction:
Wastewater epidemiology is a powerful tool for public health surveillance, capable of providing early warnings for the spread of illness, illicit substances and more within a community through low-cost, inclusive and noninvasive testing. This data can power informed policy making, rapid response public health efforts, and guide the healthcare industry's efforts to focus on populations in need.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in wastewater-based epidemiology (“WBE”) becoming a broadly recognized and accepted data point in monitoring community health. Biobot has continued to expand its WBE coverage through nationwide contracts with the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (“HHS”) and the CDC, in addition to state, county, and city-wide contracts.
With the rapid increase in demand for community health monitoring services during the COVID-19 pandemic, Biobot grew revenues 35x from 2019 to 2020, and has maintained the momentum over the past 3 years. The Company exceeded its Series A projections for 2022 revenue with $21.6M realized, and is on track to beat its estimate for 2023 by 25%, reaching nearly $40M in total revenue this year. Biobot’s historical revenues and near term projections are shown below.
Since Plum Alley’s initial investment in the 2021 Series A, Biobot has signed and renewed contracts with the CDC, U.S. Department of Defense, the state governments of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Washington, the city of Boston, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and many local municipal governments across the country. Biobot has also begun testing internationally, with a pilot program in Lithuania going live in recent weeks. The Company is engaged in commercial contracts with Fortune 500 companies, including a global bulge bracket bank, for building-level testing, and is in the process of converting a paid pilot for its data-as-a-service offering with a major pharmaceutical company into a recurring contract. Biobot has taken a measured approach to its product pipeline, with considerations towards pressing community health parameters and relevant data repositories for pharma commercialization.
Data Product Traction:
Of particular significance, Biobot has launched its data-as-a-service offering, which provides customers access to proprietary data sets from specific testing assays via the Biobot software platform or APIs. Biobot is currently in a pilot contract worth up to $1M+ in 2023 to prove out the value of this offering with a major pharma customer for COVID-19, and is working to expand its engagement to additional teams and data sets. COVID-19 and 5 additional assays in Biobot’s near term product roadmap represents a $126M-$315M ARR opportunity for the Company, as each additional assay unlocks new customers.
Further details on Biobot’s customers, revenues, and projections are available in the Company Data Room.
The demand for WBE and community health data is creating new markets and customer segments. Biobot currently services customers in the following verticals:
- Wastewater Treatment Plants: includes federal, state and local levels (16,000 total testing sites nationwide)
- Community Manholes: primarily in cities, for more granular population health data (26,400 total sites)
- Enterprises: building-level testing, including universities, military bases, nursing homes and prisons (27,340 total sites)
These three verticals combine for a $10B+ immediate serviceable market for Biobot, with additional room for expansion into other customer categories like transit centers, including airports and railways, and international expansions.
In addition to these core market segments for testing services, Biobot is introducing a new market segment for its data-as-a-service product, which provides access to WBE data for specific assays. Biobot can play a role in reducing costs associated with drug development and increasing treatment effectiveness. A significant portion of drug development and deployment costs stem from the need to find relevant patient populations for both clinical trials and ultimately treatment. Biobot’s technology provides a capital efficient method of identifying and targeting potential patients.
It is important to note that the data-as-a-service opportunity presented to Biobot does not end with drug developers. The healthcare sector includes a massive ecosystem of related industries surrounding the development & deployment of new therapeutics. Multiple segments of this cycle represent attractive revenue opportunities for the Company to service demand with existing data.
Testing Overview
Biobot’s testing product is twofold, encompassing a test kit that is sent to customers and then returned with a composite wastewater sample, and a report generated by their lab and data analysis providing a detailed visualization of the findings. These reports are then shared with the customer directly via the Biobot dashboard for easy access. The customer’s data is also put into context with historical data from the same geography over the past month, and ranked in the given parameter compared to a national heatmap. Biobot can estimate the penetration of the testing target in the community, and contrast their data against clinical data to determine if there is a significant population that is not being tracked by clinics.
In early 2020, Biobot recognized the significance of the COVID-19 pandemic, and rapidly developed and validated a testing assay for identifying the presence of the virus. This flexibility has continued to allow the Company to rapidly respond to shifting health considerations and customer demands. Since this adjustment, product development has focused on incorporating new strains of COVID-19, as well as Monkeypox which first occurred in 2022. This year, Biobot has also launched its Norovirus assay, with significant interest from new and existing customers. Assays for influenza, RSV and more are expected to be released in the coming weeks as well.
Data-as-a-Service Overview
A critical aspect of Biobot’s product development progress since the Series A is in the Company’s data-as-a-service offering. WBE presents a unique and irreplicable view into overall community health, which presents a real value to markets beyond government and enterprise testing customers. Biobot has the opportunity to solve a major pain-point for pharma companies and other players in the healthcare ecosystem: finding invisible patient populations. Current data sources, like clinic visits or testing results, are insufficient and can miss large portions of the population eligible for treatments. With WBE coverage, especially via the massive data lake Biobot has developed through nationwide contracts, stakeholders can reduce costs and improve results via greater efficiencies in finding patient populations.
The below chart showcases Biobot’s target contract structure with pharma partners, where multiple teams license access to data analytics services across multiple testing assay data sets. This land-and-expand strategy results in a rapid revenue ramp as the value proposition is realized between business segments.
Further details on Biobot’s product roadmap and data-as-a-service strategy can be found in the Company Data Room.
The chart below showcases the progress the company has made since early 2021 in expanding its active sampling locations and monthly revenues. The point in September 2021 indicates the end of the 3-month HHS pilot program, which was successfully rolled into an ongoing CDC program beginning in April 2022. The monthly revenue totals also exclude R&D revenue earned via partnerships.
Biobot’s rapid growth has been driven by three key trends among new and existing customers:
1. Increasing Sites per Customer: Single-payer wastewater treatment plants (“WWTPs”) are being consolidated into government agency contracts, with the average contract now covering five sites. For example, in May 2021, Biobot serviced 10 sites for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH), in addition to multiple single-site contracts with WWTPs. As of Dec 2022, the DPH contract had expanded to 57 sites, streamlining the process for both parties without material price compression.
2. Sticky Customer Contracts: The uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in many customers initially engaging with Biobot on a month-to-month basis. Since then, the Company has made significant strides in converting customers to long term contracts, with 95% of current sites under long term agreements with an average length of 1 year. A notable example of this is the conversion of the three month pilot program with the HHS into an 18 month initial contract with the CDC, which is now in the process of transitioning to an Indefinite Duration Indefinite Quantity (“IDIQ”) contract, for long term service.
3. Innovative WBE analytics beyond COVID: Biobot’s work in Covid-19 has validated WBE as a technology, and customers are now interested in additional applications. New contracts frequently include multiple assays, including ones still under development, demonstrating the sustained commercial interest in WBE beyond COVID-19. Examples of this interest include the CDC IDIQ contract, which will be structured to allow additional assays to be added without additional approvals, and the new WA state contract, which includes COVID-19, variants, and assays under development (Norovirus & flu).
Biobot intends to continue this momentum with the capital infusion from the current Series A extension opportunity. With 35% of funds earmarked for growing the sales and marketing team, the Company has significant pipeline opportunities it will seek to capitalize on in the coming months. These efforts include scaling the existing domestic sales teams, including technical sales expertise, and support teams for customer success. Biobot will also establish an international sales team for geographic expansion, and an in-house marketing team with dedicated resources to raise the Company’s profile as a market-leading WBE provider and further evangelize the benefit of community health monitoring.
Leadership Team
Mariana Matus - Co-Founder & CEO: Originally from Mexico City, Dr. Matus received her PhD in Computational Biology from MIT, where she specialized in the emerging field of wastewater epidemiology. In addition to her doctoral studies, Dr. Matus co-founded the MIT Underworlds Smart Sewers Project with Newsha Ghaeli, among others, which led to the creation of Biobot Analytics and the Company’s proprietary wastewater platform. Dr. Matus has also testified before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology for their hearing on “The New Normal: Preparing for and Adapting to the Next Phase of COVID-19.”
Newsha Ghaeli - Co-Founder & President: As a trained architect with undergraduate and graduate degrees from U. of Waterloo & McGill University, prior to founding Biobot, Ghaeli was a researcher at MIT exploring the application of technologies in cities to build more responsive and resilient communities. Ghaeli was a Research Fellow at the MIT Senseable Cities Lab, an instructor in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and led the department’s involvement in the MIT Underworlds Smart Sewers Project. In 2022, Ghaeli was invited to be the MIT Department of Urban Studies & Planning Commencement Keynote Speaker.
Biobot and its co-founders have been recognized for their leadership, entrepreneurial excellence, and evangelization of a vision for the future of our cities and healthy buildings. Awards and recognition include:
Andy Zeilman - COO: Andy leads Biobot’s finance, people & lab operations, program management and corporate strategy teams, bringin 25+ years of operating experience across growth strategies, investment banking, operations, sales, product management, marketing and consulting. Prior to joining Biobot, Andy was Chief Strategy Officer & Co-COO at Affectiva, the global leader in computer vision AI designed to infer human behavior and emotional state, where he guided the company through an acquisition by SmartEye AB. Additionally, Andy has worked at Nuance Communications, served as a Special Agent in the FBI, and had roles in investment banking focused on capital raises and M&A advisory. Andy is a graduate from Dartmouth College and received his MBA Cum Laude from Babson College.
Doug Wendel - CTO: Doug leads Biobot’s tech organization, including the software, data science, and technical project management teams. His focus is on guiding product development and operations, internal tooling development, and setting the vision for Biobot’s long term technology roadmap. Doug comes to Biobot with more than 25 years of software, data science, cybersecurity, and cloud operations experience, and 15 years of professional experience in the genomics and data science fields. Prior to joining Biobot, he served at ArcherDX from a very early stage, as co-developer of the core targeted NGS software systems, lead the software, data science, and cloud operations teams through a hyper-growth phase, and ultimately transitioned to Head/VP of Oncology Cloud Operations after acquisition by Invitae in 2020 where he managed a team of ~150 software engineers, data scientists and DevOps professionals.
Biobot Advisors:
Further biographies for Biobot’s management team, Board Members, and Advisors are available in the Company Data Room.
Biobot is playing a leading role in the healthcare revolution that has been accelerated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Through providing an accurate and comprehensive view of communal health and a massive data warehouse of historical data across the country, Biobot is able to provide community health information not provided by clinical data. Biobot's health insights have the potential to save lives through fast reactions and even preventative measures of communal health. Biobot has serviced a quarter of the U.S. population. This has enabled a greater understanding of community health with more than 8000 tests run, which continues to build their data warehouse for deeper insights and a virtuous cycle of growth.
In addition, by providing the healthcare industry with new insights into hidden patient populations, Biobot is able to help democratize the drug development process through both target and patient identification. This can result in therapeutics developed for more demographics, and more patients being made aware of potentially life-saving treatments.
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