Liran Belenzon is the Co-Founder and CEO of BenchSci.

BenchSci's mission is to exponentially increase the speed and quality of life-saving R&D to improve patients' health.
They do this by applying cutting-edge AI to understand how disease biology works at scale throughout the drug discovery pipeline to solve the number one reason why drug discovery projects fail — getting the biology wrong.
ASCEND, their disease biology GenAI platform, understands the entire history of biomedical experiments to create a scalable AI assistant for preclinical organizations.

Takeaways

The genesis story of BenchSci.
Thoughts on commercialization and how to do it well.
How Liran has scaled with the company as a leader and founder.
Step changes in headcount.
How BenchSci navigates in-person, remote and hybrid work.
Liran's contrarian thoughts on raising money and how he has raised $200M+.
Why you should only do investor updates for investors and not potential investors.
How AI has changed over the last 8+ years of BenchSci's journey.
Building a network as an immigrant founder.
Scaling product offerings.
Working and selling into big pharma and research teams.
Hiring for BenchSci's unique intersection of AI and bio.


Chapters
00:00 The Genesis of BenchSci
03:12 Navigating the Drug Discovery Landscape
05:47 Commercialization Challenges and Strategies
08:59 Scaling as a Founder
11:59 Remote Work Dynamics
14:51 Mastering the Fundraising Process
19:52 The Evolution of AI in Drug Discovery
23:12 Understanding the Drug Discovery Process
25:54 Building Trust with Researchers
28:50 Overcoming Networking Challenges
32:14 Scaling Product Offerings
35:01 Hiring for a Unique Intersection
36:57 Personal Reflections and Future Outlook

Keywords
BenchSci, drug discovery, AI, commercialization, startup, scaling, fundraising, remote work, biology, technology

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