Ashu Singhal is Co-Founder and President at Benchling, the R&D Cloud platform that powers the biotechnology industry. He leads product development and strategy, helping over 200,000 scientists at 1,200+ companies accelerate breakthrough discoveries.

Ashu earned a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from MIT, where he conducted research in optogenetics and functional genomics. Before Benchling, he co-founded Hotspots.io, a social media analytics company acquired by Twitter, and worked as a Staff Software Engineer at Twitter on big data systems.

Since co-founding Benchling in 2012, Ashu has been responsible for building the platform that serves top biopharma companies like Regeneron, Sanofi, and Gilead. In 2021, Benchling customers received nearly one-third of all FDA new biologics approvals.

Benchling has raised over 412M in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Altimeter Capital, achieving a 6.1B valuation. The company joined Y Combinator in 2012 and has grown to serve over 1,300 biotech organizations globally.

Benchling powers R&D across biopharma, agriculture, consumer goods, and materials, enabling scientists to collaborate on cutting-edge techniques like CRISPR and CAR-T immunotherapy. The platform has become the central source of truth for scientific data, helping accelerate drug development and reduce costs by streamlining research workflows.