Transcriptic has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding, in a round led by Data Collective, with participation from IA Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, 500 Startups, MITS Fund, Y Combinator partner Paul Buchheit and several other angel investors.

The Menlo Park-based company has raised just over $14 million to date for its robot-operated biolab, and is all set to move into drug-screening tests.

Transcriptic has a team of 26, more than half of which are hardware engineers designing and building the robots that run the automated lab.

“When we started Transcriptic, we set out with the goal of giving the life sciences the same structural advantages that web has enjoyed, making it possible for two postdocs with a laptop in a coffee shop to run a drug company without the need for millions of dollars in capital equipment or lab space,” founder Max Hodak writes on a recent blog post about the funding news.

The startup has yet to reach its goal, but Hodak hopes that with the growth of the team and the new equipment, Transcriptic is getting closer to that reality.

[Via: TechCrunch]