"At first I was like, this is kind of crazy," says Blake Byers, a partner at Google Ventures, which led a $1.2 million seed investment in Transcriptic last December. "Are you really going to automate all the nuance that is biology?" But Byers, who earned his PhD in bioengineering from Stanford, came around in part because of his own experiences in labs. "It’s a fact that I’ve wasted many hours of my life moving my hand around to transport small volumes of liquid from one tube to another."

"I’ve wasted many hours of my life moving my hand around to transport small volumes of liquid from one tube to another."

That feeling was familiar to Max Hodak, the 24-year-old entrepreneur who founded Transcriptic nearly two years ago. A native of New York City, Hodak built and sold his previous startup before he could legally drink. That company, MyFit, focused on helping students identify the right colleges. But Hodak spent much of his time as an undergraduate at Duke University researching brain-machine interfaces, and saw firsthand how much time in the lab is wasted. Sometimes researchers have to wait days or weeks to use a particular machine. Other times they spend days on end doing work that is essentially robotic — transferring liquid from one small well to another. And if they should make a mistake, they might not even notice for weeks.

Hodak's proposed solution is a company that tries to do for biologists what Amazon Web Services does for information technology: by making basic services cheap and accessible over the web, it lets customers try things that were not previously possible. "Most of biology is in the analysis," Hodak says inside his office. "The humans don’t add value in going to the bench and doing this stuff by hand. Humans add value by writing papers and running creative experiments that test sophisticated hypotheses. But that’s not what we’re spending most of our time on as a field."

For now, Transcriptic is a lean operation, with nine people working in a small two-story office that contains the company's lone work cell. To conserve costs, employees build much of their own equipment using 3D printing and laser-cutting tools. Among other things, they built an automated freezer that would have cost them $400,000 retail for about $8,000.

The company’s main competitors are the nation’s 1,100 contract research organizations, a multibillion-dollar industry that provides third-party support for clinical studies and trials. But Hodak doesn’t want his customers to merely run the occasional test — he wants them to build whole new companies and services using his robots. Eventually, he says, two people will be able to found their own biotech company working from a coffee shop: Transcriptic runs the tests, and the coffeeshop biologists sell the analysis.

It's an idea that has some appeal to biologists contacted by The Verge. "If you go into a lab, they basically look the same as they did in the 1980s, except for computers," says Josiah Zayner, a biochemist at the University of Chicago. (Among other experiments, Zayner has used proteins to create a new musical instrument.) Zayner is frustrated that computers in his lab still aren’t networked — checking in on one of them requires pulling the data off a USB drive. It seems archaic, given the progress of cloud computing. "I really think this is a step in the correct direction," he says of Transcriptic. "Imagine if science was industrialized, what could be accomplished."

"Imagine if science was industrialized, what could be accomplished."

Chaitan Khosla, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at Stanford, agrees. "Discovery biology and chemistry, as practiced in university and industrial labs, is more expensive than it needs to be," Khosla says. "If an organization takes on the challenge of lowering these operating costs without compromising safety and effectiveness, then that is a good thing. I would try it, and would support it, if it worked for me."